[ih] Single Malt Scotch and the history of the net Re: DARTnet: Evolution of Internet audio and video

[Bill Ricker]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 7:46 PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> The role of Single Malt Scotch in the history of the net is a  topic that
deserves exploration

One aspect of that is that MALTS-L was a very early mailing list not
directly responsive to the (d)ARPA-net charter.
(I suspect SF-lovers was in fact earlier but can neither confirm nor
refute. Yet. It moved hosts repeatedly so full archives are unavailable.)

My mentor in such matter, Mike Padlipsky, aka MAP, was an early if not
founding member of MALTS-L, and would stop in Scotland when returning from
European sittings of IRG to do "research" at the Aviemore "Cairngorm Whisky
Centre" (a Scotch Library, alas since closed). Before Sir Tim invented a
Web for Web Logs to be abbreviated to 'blogs', Mike was effectively
blogging his Single Malt Scotch search on MALTS-L (by email).

Already in the 1970s one of the early network implementors, or "Old Network
Boys" as MAP punned,
"had dropped out and bought a 'mom and pop' tree nursery in Boring [OR]
with his then-new bride. He was also one of the two other Old Network Boys
with whom I'd had my/our first tastes of Laphroaig, from around 1 A.M. to 4
A.M. after a meeting at SRI a few years earlier to do something vaguely
historical, probably refine the File Transfer Protocol"
is central to the prologue of his 40 year quest for the A&N Glen Grant MOHM
(and whatever was second best).

 AFAIK MAP never wrote the full tale, so I've collected his "Prolegomena",
his progress reports, and my own telling of the tragic phyrric denouement.
(Along with his database of tasting notes, and the tasting list for his
wake, catered from his own cellar.)

  https://n1vux.github.io/articles/MAP/Malt/index.html

(From there you can also go up to his technical bibliography and his ~first~
second ever thesis on SciFi as Lit Crit.)

As MAP would have said,
Muted Cheers

Bill Ricker, Boston
Literary and Spiritous Estate of Michael A Padlipsky