In article ,
wrote:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:32:59 -0800, "Harold and Susan Vordos"
wrote:

Still, I have one question that troubles me. Is anyone in
charge of RCM?

It appears not, it's not a moderated ng.

Why does it exist?

I'd assume to do exactly what it's doing, bringing metalworking
aficionados together for discussion on said same topic. The exact
language would be in the original charter. A good question would be;
are there any original charter members still active here? That info
might be derived by checking the final CFV (Call For Votes) where rcm
was granted it's name and then seeing if any voters names are
familiar.

I had just found it as a "trial" newsgroup (or was that "test",
and followed it into the formation of rec.crafts.metalworking. I
*think* that I got in on the CVF, but I can't swear to it. I followed
it for a while, then had to drop out for a while (insufficient time,
with the comp.unix.* and comp.sys.* ones which I *had* to follow for
work. Once I retired, I picked it up again.

One thread which I remember from the early days was when someone
posted asking for how to tune the tension rods on the underside of a
railroad carriage. (He was involved in restoring a full-sized
specialized rail carriage.

When one posts, or reads posts that
come from RCM, is there any one place where it is all on a hard drive
(besides Google)?

Nope. Heh, unless there's a super anal original charter member who's
saved every single one of them.

Hmm ... actually, now that I think of it, there *is*. The same
site that hosts the FAQ (something.uwo.edu) also hosts the archive, in
which every article that made it to their server was folded into a big
archive file. It started with one file per year,then two, and is (I
think) now there per year. It even has a few virii archived, from when
virii in newsgroups were more common. I think that it was the "good
news" virus, but I'm not sure.

These archive files can be downloaded via FTP -- but be sure
that you have plenty of bandwidth and time. As time goes on, more and
more aggressive compression algorithms were used, and IIRC, the current
one is bzip2, which leaves an extension of ".bz2". Before that "gzip"
(.gz), and perhaps before that, "compress" (.z).

[ ... ]

Usenet has been here much longer than the "web". It's the great
Grandpappy of Al Gore.

Yep -- it started out by systems calling each other via modems
using uucp to transfer files. It grew to adopt the internet when that
became generally available, but it was readily accessible before arpanet
broke up to become the internet and no longer a government monopoly.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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