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Subject:Re: Where is everybody? From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Thu, 24 Jul 1997 17:24:44 +0800
Natalie Griffith <ngriffith -at- TNC -dot- ORG> said:
> Can somebody tell me what happened to the former population of this list?
>
> I have been inactive for a lengthy relocation/transition period, and now
> that I'm hooked up again I find none of the old regular voices I have
> been conversing with over the past nearly two years, much less traffic
> overall, and much less "meaty" topics.
In my early days on techwr-l (mid-1995) I saved many messages. "Oh brave
new world, that has such people in't" I thought. "Tis new to thee", you
may well reply, and you'd be right. Until then I'd met in person exactly
zero technical writers. techwr-l was my letter of introduction to several
hundred active writers, many of whom were doing what I wanted to do and
who knew things I wanted to learn.
Bev Parks got me started. She sidled up to me one day on the playground
at alt.usage.english, said "Psst, kid! Check these out" and opened her
trench coat to reveal a cool set of threads: peer review, style guides,
paperless docs, customer satisfaction, minimal manuals, JoAnn Hackos's
book, audience analysis. True, this good stuff was often cut with much
lower quality material: in my first week, Dr Seuss, and someone's cc:Mail
server which bounced *every* message back to the list. But by then it
was too late; I was hooked.
Grepping through my Mail/docs/useful folder, I see many familiar names
from those first few weeks: Robert Plamondon, Arlen Walker, Geoff Hart,
Mark Levinson, Win Day, Sue Gallagher, Misti Delaney and Becca Price
(back then they shared an e-mail account, but for a long time I thought
it was a split-personality thing), Kat Nagel, Elna Tymes, Matt Ion,
Sandra Charker.
Other names I rarely see any more: Dick Dimock, Emily Skarzenski, Rose
Wilcox, Bonni Graham, Gwen Barnes, Betsy Maaks, and others. There were
giants in those days.
I suspect there's just as much meat on the list now as then. Perhaps our
tastes have changed.
> What happened? Or am I in the wrong list?
'The Stepford List': everything *looks* normal enough, but something
isn't quite right. . .
Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield
Functional Software Pty Ltd mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au
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