North & Co.

[John Byrd]

At 12:47 PM 5/2/97 -0500, you wrote:
>At 08:50 AM 05/2/97 +0100, pclarke at pclarke.compulink.co.uk wrote:
>
>>Apparently they were all deleted by North & Co when the solids hit the air
>conditioning, but these guys had never heard of backup tapes...
>
>Lotsa stuff on how DOS "delete" works etc.

Actually, Ollie and the boys (White House et. al) were working off the IBM
PROFS system. This is a mainframe system where backup tapes are generally
made every 24 hours or some such interval and archived essentially forever.
Ollie had deleted his e-mail from his directory on the mainframe disk, but
it was the archive tapes that the Congressional investigators went after.
Wasn't the first cybernaut to be nailed on his old e-mail, but maybe the
first famous one. Shoulda been a good object lesson to others, but nobody
learns, really.

As to having the first book ever to be based on Internet e-mail, usenet or
otherwise, I think you come behind a long line of predecessors, Jules.
Howard Rheingold comes immediately to mind, but there have been many, many
others that I've seen in bookstores but which I've never had the
inclination to buy or remember. I even started one myself in 1994, but
never finished or (thankfully) published it. 

JB




John Byrd
-------------------------
john.byrd at mindspring.com