In article ,
josephkk wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:39:07 -0400, Michael Black wrote:

On Wed, 23 Jul 2014, wrote:

Here is a link to a new Electronics Repair and Design group that I have
started, need new members and fresh ideas.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/528254330634866/

Which is it, repair or design?

20 years ago, this hierarchy consisted of sci.electronics and
sci.electronics.repair It was some time in 1995 that Mark Zenier
put in the effort to divide up sci.electronics into the multiple
newsgroups we see today, design being one of them. But for some
reason (and I wasn't around before late 1994), someone had seen fit
to make .repair a separate newsgroup, even before any other subgroups
were created.

SED started in the early 1980s. Mark Z. must be some Johnny come lately,
as Big 8 was already in place in 1995. SED predates Big 8. That is why
it has no charter.

How do I put this. Er, how about "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!".

Somtime before I got here, (I'd guess about 1983), they created
"net.analog". (Last I knew, you could read all that group's traffic in
the Google Groups archive. About 300 messages over the three of four
years it existed).

Then in the Fall of 1986, they did "The Great Renaming" that created
the Big 7 newsgroups list. net.analog became sci.electronics.
(The 8th "humanities" hierarchy came later).

(Johnny come lately? I've been participating in the newsgroups since,
near as I can tell, March 1988).

And then AOL, Microsoft and the other nationwide internet providers
came online and we got "Eternal September" around 1993-94. Traffic
in sci.electronics hit around 400 posts a day. Over the ability to
follow the group for a lot of people.

So we decided to do something about it. I stepped forward, (shoved my
way into other people business ;-) ) and did the first reorg. Using
the princple of "if you're going to split a group, pick a topic that
already has traffic for it", sci.electronics.repair and sci.electronics.cad
were voted on and created. Sci.electronics had about 25 posts on repairs
a day, the new .repair group jumped up to about 75 posts a day.

That wasn't enough, so there was a second reorg about a year later.
This ended up creating .components, .design, .equipment, .basics,
and .misc.

Why didn't sci.electronics get left as it is? They (the moderator
committee for news.announce.newgroups, the regulators of the namespace)
wouldn't let me. So, supposedly, sci.electronics.misc was to take
its place.

(I can't find this stuff on my disk and I don't want to spend the
time digging through archive CD-ROMS. There are text files that
have both reorg discussions on ftp.eskimo.com under the mzenier user
directory.)

There is a charter for sci.electronics.design. It's one line.

There was a fashion for huge "US Constitution" type charters, back then.
IMHO, all that did was attract language lawyer net.trolls determined to
cause trouble by following the letter but not the spirit of the charters.
Since the reaction to abuse is the same whether or not it's in the
charter, keep the charter at a minimum.

There's also a Rationale in the vote announcment that discusses the three
level split of .components/.design/.equipment that should be taken into
account for the charters of all three groups.


Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)