[ih] Flaming

[Elizabeth Feinler]

Flaming was a problem for the Network Information Center, as we often were the distributor of messages or keepers of various online lists.  We constantly reviewed things before they were sent out to make sure there were no flames or inappropriate words.  I used to have a file online called My-old-flames, but alas it got deleted somewhere along the way.

If I remember rightly (and I may not), there was a lot of flaming back in the 70s in the discussion leading up to the Telnet protocol and options.  One contributor found it almost impossible to criticize someone’s idea without calling the originator of the idea names.  This person was young and fairly new to the network, so the older moderator tried to caution him – first offline, then a couple of times online – to stop the personal assaults.  The warnings came to no avail, and the personal assaults got worse.  Finally the moderator in desperation sent out a message to the perpetrator with the subject line,  “Okay, it’s come to this….”  And the message was “Your mother wears combat boots!”  

The amusing thing was that the perpetrator was so young that he had never heard the old military saying that implied that one’s mother was essentially a prostitute, and was a major insult.  He called me at the NIC to ask me what the message meant!  Sigh!

I also remember one I sent out to the NIC staff entitled “Jelly on the keys” which complained bitterly about people eating jelly donuts at the workstations and gunking up the keyboards.  In those days we had to share workstations and keyboards. 

I also let one fly at Dan Lynch one time when there was a paper shortage and I was about to run off the Arpanet Resource Handbook (a 2 inch thick document)  Dan managed the SRI computer facility at the time and had failed to anticipate the paper shortage, and so we ran out of paper.  Consequently, I couldn’t print the Resource Handbook and had to renege on deadlines.  It was one of my better efforts at flaming (for which I later apologized.)

Cheers,

Jake

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