What is the Cyhist Archive?

Below is a complete archive of all posts to Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace. The purpose of this list is to create an oral history of cyberspace meaning the discussion of the history of computers, computer networks, and related technologies.

This archive contains unique first-person recollections from people who were active in building the Internet and its precursor networks, such as Arpanet, and myriad other networks and computers, dating back to the 1940s. The purpose of this archive is to serve future and present scholars and researchers interested in the history of cyberspace. For this reason, you are widely invited to store this archive of messages and make it publicly available via the Internet for people to search and retrieve the posts contained herein.

To ensure that this archive exists in perpetuity, please copy and duplicate and circulate to others, so that several copies may exist online. The wider it spreads, the more likely it will survive over time. Ideally, this entire archive would be placed online and made accessible through a searchable web-based interface, and indexed, in turn, by additional commercial search engines. Libraries are invited to add this archive to their digital collections.

The list is known as "CYHIST" and ran on two different listservers. The first listserver is cpsr-history@cpsr.org; that listserver handled messages from June 4, 1996 until August 15, 1996, when it was shut down. On August 13, 1996 all subscribers were shifted to a new listserver known as cyhist@maelstrom.stjohns.edu Searchable archives of the cpsr-history@cpsr.org messages are available at:
http://www.memex.org/community-memory.html
Searchable archives of the cyhist@maelstrom.stjohns.edu messages can be found at:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/cyhist.html

The St. Johns listserver is running as of the time of this note: June 21, 2004. However, due to a system-wide deletion of archives of listservers running at stjohns.edu scheduled for July 2004, the archives from 1999 and earlier will be deleted shortly. Thus the need to begin syndicating out copies of the CYHIST archives. What follows below is the complete list of posts, merged between the two listservers, from June 4, 1996 through June 20, 2004.

In addition, due to the increasingly tiny volume of posts on CYHIST, it is possible that the list will be retired shortly. To investigate whether there are more posts than those contained in this archive, visit http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/cyhist.html If there are posts past June 20, 2004, then the list is still active to the latest date in the archive. If that URL no longer works, there is a good chance the list has been shut down.

Please keep the information contained in the header of this file with the archive so people can understand the scope of the messages stored herein. The moderator of this is David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com) and this email address can be used to clarify any questions regarding the nature of this archive, how best to make it available to the public, and any other questions relating to this list. Thank you for participating in the preservation of this unique digital record.

--David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com), June 21, 2004.