For an introduction to this thread's hierarchical posts, please see the first post in the series, for the NET.* hierarchy. This post is closest to the final form, of the posts in this preliminary version of the chronology. I got carried away. Joe Bernstein THE fa.* HIERARCHY --Rise-- The name "fa" stands for "from ARPAnet". ARPAnet was a network created in 1969 and operated, from 1975 to 1990, by the Defense Communications Agency of the Department of Defense of the United States of America. It is generally considered the most important single ancestor of the Internet (which itself seems to have begun in 1975). Mailing lists on ARPAnet began in 1975, and quickly became one of the ARPAnet's most popular features. Before May 18, 1980, the University of California at Berkeley's "ucbvax" computer had joined Usenet. Berkeley already had an ARPAnet connection on different machines, and at some point, according to Ronda Hauben, Mark Horton, Eric Allman and Eric Schmidt, Berkeley graduate students, began "gatewaying" ARPAnet mailing lists from those machines via ucbvax into Usenet. I don't know at what point these mailing lists were turned into separate newsgroups (it could have been at the beginning, whenever that was, or could equally easily have been in March 1981, for all I can tell); at any rate, NET.unix-wizards probably existed by April 7, 1981. The fa.* hierarchy arose from Mark Horton's renaming of these newsgroups out of NET.*, on or near May 12, 1981. The ARPAnet mailing lists were crucial to the growth of Usenet, according to reminiscences by Steve Bellovin, one of Usenet's founders. This is because they were much-desired content. Lots of people knew about the ARPAnet lists - I actually read about them in a book while still a child, prior to the birth of Usenet! - but since ARPAnet was a military project, however undisciplined, access to it was restricted. The Usenet gateways offered those without ARPAnet access the opportunity to read, and perhaps to post to, these lists, and this in turn provided the core content that induced system administrators to join Usenet. This effect was important to making Usenet big enough to produce much-desired content of its own; Steve Bellovin's phrase was "critical mass". As a fairly obvious consequence, fa.* groups were sometimes among the busiest and most interesting of the early Usenet groups, although in several cases such busy and interesting groups wound up being renamed into net.*, once gateways were sufficiently worked out. --Fall-- The Usenet-ARPAnet links suffered from three major difficulties. First, the ARPAnet lists themselves could be unstable. Some lists were human-moderated, and in the absence of a moderator, the list didn't function. Lists were sometimes scrutinised for military usefulness - at one point, the SF-LOVERS list, a quite obviously irrelevant one, was apparently saved by the argument that it provided practice in the management of large mailing lists! Second, the gateways could be unstable. If the person who gated a particular list left the institution on whose computer the gateway lived, the gateway might shut down. Also, some ARPAnet participants disapproved of the gateways, and an offensive posting from a Usenet participant, or a decision by a list moderator, might result in a gateway being shut down. The main gateways remained at Berkeley throughout the official life of the hierarchy, and Berkeley had an institutional investment in Unix that generated considerable dedication to Usenet (the most prominent Unix communication network), but there were gateways elsewhere that had less support. Third, and most relevant to the fate of the hierarchy as a whole, the arrangements for posting left a lot to be desired. The distributed nature of Usenet, and the limitations of then-current software, meant that posts were normally *not* automatically forwarded back to the list moderator or address across the gateway. As a general rule, therefore, to post to an fa.* group and reach the ARPAnet readers as well, you had to e-mail the article to the moderator or list address. In those days, e-mailing people on different networks could be a challenge. Since Usenet software provided no way to require posters to e-mail, sometimes people would post normally instead, resulting in content that the ARPAnet side of the group didn't see. And this in turn promoted additional conflict between the participants from the two networks. There were other reasons to try to implement moderation as a Usenet mechanism, and in 1983 experimental groups - net.announce and mod.ber - were created. Finally in October 1984 the mod.* hierarchy opened for serious business. Usenet moderation implemented e-mail to moderators as a requirement of posting, and Gene Spafford began to post lists of moderators with extensive information on how to e-mail the moderators. Moreover, already by the fall of 1985, news software existed that not only enforced the e-mail requirement, but enabled it, keeping moderators' addresses stored and mailing posts to them automatically. This of course became increasingly easy as more and more Usenet sites obtained direct access to the Internet. All in all, mod.* groups could not suffer the sort of split discussion that fa.* groups could. Although groups came and went, the hierarchy remained stable at sixteen to nineteen official groups from late 1981 to early 1985. Then Gene Spafford rmgrouped five groups that had been devoid of traffic for seven or more months. And in mid-1985, the ucbvax news-admin, Erik Fair, who then signed his posts "guardian of the gateway", began pushing to rename the remaining fa.* groups into mod.* so as to take advantage of Usenet moderation. The renaming was accomplished around October 21 of that year, extinguishing the official fa.* hierarchy. There followed considerable complaints into November: about the new names; about the fact that not all of the fa.* groups had in fact been moderated as mailing lists (the gateway operator for fa.laser-lovers suddenly found himself made a moderator, without his consent!); about wrong addresses and bad propagation; and about the fact that the action was taken without much effort to gather consensus on Usenet. Five fa.* groups based on unmoderated mailing lists - fa.arpa-bboard, fa.info-vax, fa.info-vlsi, fa.laser-lovers, and fa.tcp-ip - were nevertheless renamed into moderated newsgroups - net.announce.arpa-internet, mod.computers.vax, mod.vlsi, mod.computers.laser-printers, and mod.protocols.tcp-ip respectively. Of these, only mod.computers.laser-printers remained a moderated group (comp.laser-printers) after the Great Renaming; and that group has now been dead for over a decade. Additional references on this renaming, beyond those mentioned in the set of annual summaries: Erik Fair "proposed new structure for `fa' groups" October 3, 1985 net.news.group Message-ID: 10523@ucbvax.ARPA Gene Spafford ""fa" to "mod" group conversion started" October 21, 1985 net.announce Message-ID: 1647@gatech.CSNET --Afterlife-- That ends the official story, the story told, among other things, in the following list of official fa.* newsgroups. However, it's worth noting that fa.* has turned out to be a much more durable concept. This fact can be traced in the Google archives, but little more can be learnt there, and Cameron Laird's list of newsgroup archives offers no fa.* group archives as alternatives to Google. Here's what I can offer. Already in 1981 newsgroups existed that never made it onto official lists - fa.apollo, fa.dungeon, and fa.test all have postings preserved at Google, for example. But the main source for Google's archives of the 1980s is the University of Toronto's archives, and by the time fa.* was officially shut down, Toronto had become a "backbone" site, invested in the official list. One can find in the archives posts about the continued life of fa.* groups, but not posts from the groups themselves. The exception to this rule is that posts which went to official net.*, mod.*, or Big 7 groups but also, via cross-posting, to fa.* groups, might be archived; and a tiny scattering of such posts does survive. This scattering consists, on average, of tolerably clueful posts (albeit heavy on the cross-posting, which is a predictable result of the fact that only cross-posts were archived). There's no reason to think the posters were inventing the fa.* groups they posted to, but some of these, such as fa.prolog, had never been official: someone, somewhere, was still creating fa.* groups. This archival pattern of cross-posts only continues, with increasing percentages of alpha-spams but with consistent presence of plausible never-official groups, straight through to 1997, a year whose main archival source is the considerably more liberal DejaNews. By this time the single most-often cross-posted-to fa.* group was fa.cisco. The archives abruptly present one day's worth of posts from several fa.* groups in July 1997, and then, just as abruptly, beginning on November 16, 1997, there are apparently full archives of an increasing number of fa.* groups, beginning with fa.cisco, and with no hint whatever that the groups had just been started. My interpretation of these facts is that the basic idea of gatewaying remained prevalent, and, as witness the complaints in November 1985, not everyone saw the "official" abolition of the fa.* hierarchy as a particularly good reason to stop using it. It's worth noting that already by the end of 1986, news software existed that allowed full-blown moderation of groups outside mod.* and *.announce; there was then no longer any reason *not* to use an fa.* name, and the name scheme was anyway established and known. So I would expect that the existing groups are the work of random individuals doing gateways, not especially coordinated, and that there is probably therefore no one place where records of the hierarchy might have been kept. (The substantial fa.linux.* hierarchy would seem to be at least one probably-organised exception.) There certainly is no hint of an existing fa.* hierarchy administration in Simon Lyall's config.ctl file (which recommends deleting any fa.* groups); there is only a scattering of control messages at the ftp.isc.org archive, none of them matching the more successful of the current groups. Given these formidable obstacles, I have no reason to think I'll be able to tell the post-1985 story of the fa.* groups in my chronological work - one reason I do chronology is that I'm not enough of a people person to do real history by going around and talking to people and so forth. But I do wish to record here that the story does exist. GROUP BY GROUP Note: Description lines are reformatted as necessary, but the text in them is exactly what the original list has. In some cases, the assembled descriptions flatly contradict each other (fa.laser-lovers is the most extreme case). In order to ensure that this set of posts gets done at all, I'm having to limit the research I do. So in this post I make no attempt to arbitrate which description is right, but simply include the first and last line for each group. (In the rare cases where the first and last lines are identical, I include only the first.) Again to avoid delaying the initial series of posts, I'm also not consistently including in this post which mailing lists these groups derived from, or who gatewayed them and where. That information is obviously high on my list of things to include in the later version of the chronology. fa.all Listed on December 16, 1981 only. Description line (12/16/1981): Forwarded Arpanet mailing lists The 12/16/1981 list was written by Mark Horton, who as late as the 1983 RFC 850 was using "all" as a sort of equivalent of "*". In this context, "fa.all" probably meant "The fa.* hierarchy". Since fa.all did not appear in Mark Horton's related December 23 "list", I'm inclined to think it wasn't meant to be seen as a group in the December 16 list. fa.arms-d Renamed from NET.arms-d on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Archived: May 19 to July 16, 1981; May 11 to October 26, 1982; January 31 to March 26, 1983; May 19, 1983; September 25 to October 16, 1983; April 23, 1984 to July 9, 1985; October 18 to 29, 1985. There are posts documenting that a number of these gaps were real gaps in the ARPAnet list (which was usually moderated), not just in the gateway or the archive. I'm not certain, but think the mailing list was *not* moderated by July 16, 1981. Description line (12/16/1981): Continuing debate on arms (arms-d@MC) Moderators: Herb Lin, May 11, 1982 to October 16, 1983; John Larson and Dave Caulkins, April 23, 1984 to some undetermined date in 1985. Description line (10/15/1985): Arms discussion digest. Renamed to mod.politics.arms-d circa October 21, 1985. fa.arpa-bboard Renamed from NET.arpa-bboard on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Archived: May 15, 1981 to February 5, 1982 (infrequent posts); May 12 to September 22, 1982; March 7, 1984 to October 11, 1985. While I find it implausible that this list could have been unmoderated, I find no references to a "moderator" in a Google search of the newsgroup (except in conference announcements), and, outside the newsgroup, no posts other than lists of newsgroups that use both "fa.arpa-bboard" and "moderator". If it *was* unmoderated, the standards of its posters were exceptionally high. Description line (12/16/1981): Arpanet bulletin boards (arpanet-bboards@AI) Description line (10/15/1985): ARPANET bulletin board. Renamed to net.announce.arpa-internet circa October 21, 1985. fa.bitgraph Archived: July 7 to August 9, 1982. Apparently unmoderated (one of the few posts archived is a mailing list subscription request). Listed November 21, 1982 to February 1, 1985 without interruption. Description line (11/21/1982): Info and discussions on bit graphics. Description line (2/1/1985): The BBN bitgraph terminal. Rmgrouped by Gene Spafford on or before February 6, 1985 for lack of activity since May of 1984 (nearly two years later than the end of Google's archive). fa.digest-p Archived: December 7, 1981 to January 30, 1982. The latter date may actually represent the mailing list's or the gateway's end. I see no sign in the archived posts of a moderator. Listed December 16, 1981 to February 1, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): For Digest maintainers A post by Dave Curry to net.news.direc, on June 28, 1982, lists mailing addresses for all of the other fa.* groups but offers only question marks for this one. Description line (2/1/1985): Digest-people digest. Rmgrouped by Gene Spafford on or before February 6, 1985 for lack of activity since at *least* November 1983, and for lack of a surviving equivalent ARPAnet list. fa.editor-p Archived: October 2, 1981 to October 27, 1982; December 19, 1982; March 13, 1983; June 3 to June 5, 1983; September 21 to October 10, 1983; July 17, 1984. Unmoderated until November 2, 1981. Moderator: J. Q. Johnson, November 2, 1981 to July 17, 1984 (probably), or June 5, 1983 (certainly). Listed December 16, 1981 to February 1, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): Editors (editor-people@su-score) Description line (2/1/1985): Editor-people digest. Rmgrouped by Gene Spafford on or before February 6, 1985 for lack of activity since at least August 1984. fa.energy Renamed from NET.energy on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to February 1, 1985 without interruption. Archived: May 15 to June 24, 1981; July 14, 1982. Moderators: Oded Feingold, May 15 to 23, 1981 and June 23, 1981 to July 14, 1982; Robert Kerns, May 28 to June 10, 1981. Description line (12/16/1981): Various energy topics (energy@MC) Description line (2/1/1985): Energy programs, conservation, etc. Rmgrouped by Gene Spafford on or before February 6, 1985 for lack of activity since at *least* November 1983. fa.home-sat No posts are archived at Google. Renamed from NET.home-sat on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed on May 12, 1981 only. (Since that list had no description lines, none are available for this group.) No post available at Google explains its removal. fa.human-nets Renamed from NET.human-nets on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Archived: May 12 to June 4, 1981; May 19, 1982; July 31, 1982 to April 18, 1983 (sometimes spottily); June 1, 1983 to March 16, 1984; June 29, 1984 to November 11, 1985; there are also smaller gaps, but in general this is an unusually good archival for an fa.* group. Moderators: Don Erway (name inferred from address and .sig), May 12 to June 4, 1981; Mike Peeler, May 19, 1982; Mel Pleasant, July 31, 1982 to July 9, 1983; Charles McGrew, July 13, 1983 to November 11, 1985. Description line (12/16/1981): Computers in the real world (human-nets@AI) Description line (10/15/1985): Computer aided communications digest. Renamed to mod.human-nets circa October 21, 1985. Note: This is generally described as one of the most important of the fa.* groups (the others I've seen so described are fa.unix-wizards and fa.sf-lovers), and it's the only one of those that remained in fa.* until the end. fa.info-cpm Renamed from NET.info-cpm on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to June 15, 1983 without interruption. Archived May 15 to June 28, 1981; May 12, 1982 to February 24, 1983 (copiously!); September 19 to 23, 1984. The list-owner was Frank Wancho, at least in 1981-82. He seems to have treaded very lightly, and I don't think this was a moderated mailing list as that phrase is usually understood, although on at least one occasion he threatened to unsubscribe people or shut the list down over an obscenity. Description line (12/16/1981): The CP/M operating system (info-cpm@AI) Description line (6/15/1983): CP/M (Control Program / Micro) Operating System mailing list. Rmgrouped apparently by Adam Buchsbaum, June 16, 1983, as duplicative of net.micro.cpm. Probably rmgrouped again by Ron Heiby in late September, 1984 in response to the September 1984 traffic, which apparently resulted from a mistake of Erik Fair's. Listed on October 1, 1984 only. Description line (10/1/1984): Talk about the popular microcomputer OS, CPM. "Deleted" by Gene Spafford, per a posting October 6, 1984, as duplicative of net.micro.cpm. fa.info-kermit Archived November 28, 1984 to October 29, 1985. Moderator: Frank da Cruz. Listed December 1, 1984 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/1/1984): Information about the popular Kermit software package. Renamed to mod.protocols.kermit circa October 21, 1985. fa.info-mac Archived June 26, 1984 to April 8, 1985 (extremely copiously; many of the digests are missing, but I think they were simply split into the individual posts of which they were made, and individual posts are profuse); June 6 to November 6, 1985. Moderators: Edward Pattermann, June 26, 1984 to ?December 14, 1984; John Mark Agosta, ?December 14, 1984 to June 12, 1985 and July 23 to August 6, 1985; Richard Alderson, July 6 to July 16 and August 21 to November 6, 1985. This applies to the INFO-MAC mailing list; the INFO-APPLEBUS mailing list was also gated into this group, according to Erik Fair, but I find few postings discernibly from it in the archive and so don't know whether that list was moderated. I find it incredible that INFO-MAC was moderated, quite honestly, in view of the number of postings. Wow. Gateway: Richard Furuta at the University of Washington. Listed July 1, 1984 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (7/1/1984): MAC micros. Description line (10/15/1985): Apple MacIntosh micros. Split, ostensibly, into mod.computers.macintosh and mod.protocols.appletalk circa October 21, 1985. fa.info-micro Renamed from NET.info-micro on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to November 21, 1982 without interruption. Archived May 19, 1981 to January 29, 1982. Moderator: Christopher Stacy, May 19 to July 30, 1981. Apparently unmoderated from August 8, 1981 (a request to be added to the mailing list is archived from December 18, 1981), although I gather Keith Petersen was the list-owner at some point. Description line (12/16/1981): Microcomputers (info-micro@AI) Description line (11/21/1982): Info and discussions on micro computers. Rmgrouped by Adam Buchsbaum on or near December 5, 1982, as duplicative of net.micro. fa.info-terms Renamed from NET.info-terms on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Archived May 25 to October 29, 1981 (spottily); January 29 to August 14, 1982; December 23, 1982 to April 26, 1983; September 4 to 24, 1983; November 14, 1984; October 21 to November 2, 1985. Patently unmoderated, since numerous archived posts, ranging in date from October 23, 1985 to (believe it or not) June 11, 1981, are subscribe or unsubscribe requests. Description line (12/16/1981): News about terminals (info-terms@MC) Description line (10/15/1985): All sorts of terminals. Apparently merged with net.info-terms circa October 21, 1985. fa.info-vax Archived November 16, 1981 to January 22, 1982; April 21 to August 17, 1982; December 1 to 31, 1982 (copiously; then the list shut down to convert to TCP/IP); February 26 to March 26, 1983; August 21 to October 19, 1983 (spottily); September 13, 1984 to October 30, 1985. Patently unmoderated; there are subscribe and unsubscribe requests throughout the 1984 and 1985 archives, and from September 1983; June 8, 1982 the list-owner (Norm Samuelson) threatened to moderate if people kept sending such requests to the list, but in July 1982 another is archived. Listed December 16, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): Information on the VAX, mostly VMS Description line (10/15/1985): DEC's VAX* line of computers. The asterisk points to a trademark reference. Renamed to mod.computers.vax circa October 21, 1985. fa.info-vlsi Listed November 21, 1982 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (11/21/1982): Info and discussions on very large scale integrated circuits. Archived November 30 to December 26, 1982; April 2 and 18, 1983; September 27, 1983; January 10, 1984; May 8 to June 17, 1984; August 13 to September 20, 1984; November 28 to December 10, 1984 (the last posting announces a change in the list's address); March 5 to 27, 1985; May 15 to October 15, 1985. The archives contain several posts about how dead the newsgroup was. Unmoderated, to judge from the subscribe and unsubscribe requests that pervade the archives of the group. Tom Linnerooth apparently was the list-owner, at least in 1985. Description line (10/15/1985): Very large scale integrated circuits. Renamed to mod.vlsi circa October 21, 1985. fa.laser-lovers Archived November 9, 1983 to March 7, 1984; May 7, 1984 to April 18, 1985; May 29 to November 13, 1985. Unmoderated. Gateway: Richard Furuta at the University of Washington. Listed November 15, 1983 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (11/15/1983): Lasers, facts, fiction, and dreams. Description line (10/15/1985): Laser printers, hardware and software. Renamed to mod.computers.laser-printers circa October 21, 1985. fa.poli-sci Created August 13, 1981 by Geoff Peck. Archived August 27 to August 28, 1981; May 12 to August 14, 1982; September 13, 1984 to November 9, 1985. Moderator: Jonathan Alan Solomon, August 27 to August 28, 1981; JoSH Hall, May 12, 1982 to November 9, 1985. Listed November 29, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): Political science (poi-sci@rutgers) Description line (10/15/1985): Politics and/versus science. Apparently merged with mod.politics circa October 21, 1985. Trivia notes: I found Steve Bellovin posting to the 1981 digests, and among the posters to the last, November 9, 1985, edition were Henry Spencer and Lynn Gazis. fa.printers Created on or near June 23, 1981 by Mark Horton (probably). Archived June 23 and August 11, 1981 (two posts). Listed December 16, 1981 to December 23, 1981 only. Description line (12/16/1981): Printers No post available at Google explains its removal. A post by Mark Horton to fa.info-terms inquires as to whether the list to be fed to fa.printers existed, but that post was posted June 14, so I must assume the reply was that the list *did* exist, which leaves open the question as to what happened. fa.railroad Archived December 14, 1981 to January 12, 1982; May 11 to July 30, 1982; September 14 to 22, 1982; March 25 to 26, 1983; October 14, 1983; May 9 to 23, 1984; July 5 to 26, 1984; November 1, 1984 to June 30, 1985; August 2 to 22, 1985. There is a post dated November 11, 1984, Message-ID <3201@ucbvax.ARPA>, which contains Usenet-side posts dated June 21 to July 30 and October 14 to November 9, 1984. Unmoderated (several subscribe requests are archived). Listed on November 21, 1982 only. Description line (11/21/1982): Info on railroads. Rmgrouped by Adam Buchsbaum on or near December 5, 1982, as duplicative of net.railroad. The gateway was apparently restored March 11, 1983, to judge from a test message at Google. Listed April 2, 1983 to August 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (4/2/1983): Railroad services and interruption of same. Description line (8/15/1985): Real and model train fans' newsgroup. Probably rmgrouped by Erik Fair shortly after August 24, 1985, as duplicative of net.railroad. fa.risks Archived September 9 to 27, 1985 (apparently as a result of a reposting of some or all of these articles by Ron Heiby, per a post by him to the group October 22, 1985). Moderator: Peter Neumann. Gateway: Brian Reid at Stanford University. Listed on October 15, 1985 only. Description line (10/15/1985): Risks and security Apparently renamed to mod.risks circa October 21, 1985. Note: This was the last fa.* group to be created. fa.sf-lovers Renamed from NET.sf-lovers on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to October 1, 1984 without interruption. Archived May 13 to June 27, 1981; May 19 to December 31, 1982 (spottily); June 5, 1983. Moderators: Jim McGrath, May 13 to June 17, 1981; Mike Peeler, June 22 to 27, 1981; Jim McGrath, May 19 to September 22, 1982; Stuart Cracraft, October 17, 1982 to December 31, 1982, and my leading suspect for June 5, 1983. Description line (12/16/1981): For science fiction fans (sf-lovers@AI) Description line (10/1/1984): Science fiction lovers' digest. "Deleted" by Gene Spafford, per a posting October 6, 1984, as inactive and duplicative of net.sf-lovers. Note: This is generally described as one of the most important of the fa.* groups. fa.space Created September 30, 1981 by Mark Horton. Archived October 1, 1981 to February 28, 1982. Moderator: Ted Anderson. Listed November 29, 1981 to November 21, 1982 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): The space program (space@mc) Description line (11/21/1982): Info and discussions on space, space programs, space related research, etc. Rmgrouped by Adam Buchsbaum on or near December 5, 1982, as duplicative of net.space. fa.tcp-ip Archived October 14, 1981 to February 5, 1982; July 26 to December 23, 1982; February 26, 1983; April 22, 1983; June 14 to October 11, 1983 (spottily); July 16, 1984; March 15, 1985; May 14 to October 19, 1985. Moderator: Michael Muuss, October 14, 1981 to October 11, 1983. Listed November 29, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): TCP & IP protocols (tcp-ip@brl) Unmoderated from at least March 15, 1985 on. Description line (10/15/1985): TCP and IP network protocols. Renamed to mod.protocols.tcp-ip circa October 21, 1985. fa.telecom Created August 21, 1981 by Geoff Peck. Archived August 27 to September 8, 1981; May 11 to September 27, 1982; October 30 to December 28, 1982; March 17, 1983 to April 10, 1984; June 20, 1984; August 3, 1984 to October 30, 1985. On the whole, this is one of the best-archived of the fa.* groups. Moderator: Jon Solomon. Listed November 29, 1981 to October 15, 1985 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): Telecommunications (telecom@rutgers) Description line (10/15/1985): Telecommunications digest. Renamed to mod.telecom circa October 21, 1985. fa.teletext Renamed from NET.teletext on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed on May 12, 1981 only. Listed January 26, 1982 to February 1, 1985 without interruption. Description line (1/26/1982): Teletext discusses all aspects of ``esoteric'' data systems. This includes teletext, viewdata, closed-captioning, and digicasting. Archived June 20 to 21, 1982 (six posts total). Description line (2/1/1985): Teletext digest. Rmgrouped by Gene Spafford on or before February 6, 1985 for lack of activity since at *least* November 1983, and for lack of a surviving equivalent ARPAnet list. fa.unix-cpm Created by Mark Horton on or near June 23, 1981, per messages posted to net.general and to the group. Archived June 24, 1981 (two posts total). Listed November 29, 1981 to "November 20, 1982" without interruption. Note that the date of the November 20, 1982 list is unreliable: it dates to sometime after March 9, 1982 and before the posting date of November 20, 1982. Description line (12/16/1981): Unix vs. CP/M (unix-cpm@UDEL) Description line ("11/20/1982"): Digest of CPM/UNIX discussions. No post available at Google explains its removal, but Google shows no traffic later than June 24, 1981. fa.unix-wizards Renamed from NET.unix-wizards on or near May 12, 1981 by Mark Horton. Listed May 12, 1981 to December 23, 1981 without interruption. Archived May 15 to December 27, 1981 (in mind-boggling profusion); July 2, 1982. Unmoderated. Description line (12/16/1981): Unix system gurus mailing list (unix-wizards@SRI-UNIX) Renamed to net.unix-wizards, probably by Andrew Knutsen, beginning about December 24, 1981. Note: This is generally described as one of the most important of the fa.* groups. fa.works Archived June 23, 1981 to March 22, 1982; August 2 to August 15, 1982. (Mark Horton asks, in an archived post dated June 20, 1981, whether an address change was correctly handled, implying that the group had existed earlier.) Unmoderated until at least August 3, 1981 (when the first digest indicates that a moderator is being sought). However, by that time Roger Duffey was already involved in the distribution of the mail, and sometimes appending notes (signed "RDD") to posts. Moderators: Roger Duffey, from whenever the list became "moderated" to October 16, 1981; Jon Solomon, October 21, 1981 to March 17, 1982; Mel Pleasant, March 17, 1982 to August 15, 1982. Listed November 29, 1981 to November 21, 1982 without interruption. Description line (12/16/1981): Work station computers (workS@AI) Description line (11/21/1982): Info and discussions on workstations. Rmgrouped by Adam Buchsbaum on or near December 5, 1982, as duplicative of net.works.