[ih] Fw: sf-lovers

[Alex McKenzie]

I received this request, but I know nothing at all about the sf-lovers mailing list.  If any of you can help please reply directly to Christopher Leslie.


----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Christopher Leslie <cleslie at poly.edu>
To: Alex McKenzie <amckenzie3 at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2012 5:28 PM
Subject: sf-lovers
 

Dear Mr. McKenzie, 

I am trying to find out a little bit about the ARPANET mailing list sf-lovers and because of your work on the network around the time it was formed, I am hoping that you could tell me a little bit about it. I am writing a book on science fiction and I think this list demonstrates an interesting connection between science fiction and engineering.

It's sometimes said that sf-lovers and human-nets were two of the mailing lists that were not directly related to defense research. I cannot get a hard date on when sf-lovers started, and which college it originated from, but in asking around I have heard that 1976 might be the right date. Do you know any of these details? Can you describe how similar sf-lovers was to what we think of a mailing list today?

I have also heard that using ARPANET came under scrutiny from Congress because of sf-lovers, and for a while the message group was banned. In Janet Abbate's book, she refers to your idea that the list was allowed to continue because it was generating useful traffic to test the network. I cannot find any news reports, and I also contacted holders of Senator Proxmire's papers to see if ARPANET was given one of his infamous awards, but I am coming up empty. Do you have any details about this incident?

There is quite a bit of information about sf-lovers when it is ported over to Usenet, but I am more interested in this early part of the story. If you have any information, or if you could direct me to someone who might know, I would greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Chris Leslie


Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D.
Instructor of Media and Technology Studies
Polytechnic Institute of New York University
6 MetroTech Center, RH 213h
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 260-3130 
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