I thing the best I can do is just post a copy of the message from the current HARP-L List owner on the oldest Harmonica Mailing list (of quality) on Internet (posted few minutes agos) : HARP-L !...

20 years ago today harp-l began

 

Here's a link to that first month and the text of the first post.  If you read past the first week things begin to pick up.  There are actually more than a couple of people still subscribed to harp-l who were around pretty much as the list began.
 
Harp-l began as a humble student run LISTSERV hosted on the Western Kentucky University computer systems.  The original listowner was Chris Pierce.  When it was no longer possible for Chris to run the list we were forced to find a new home, we settled at Garply systems and we were run by Hugh Messenger. An interesting time and the the list was hopping.  Our peak post volume occurred in this time frame.  Hugh's life changed and he was no longer able to keep up with the tasks of list ownership.
 
We continued to be hosted by garply and later the entity that garply became.  SPAH at the behest of Douglas Tate covered the costs of our hosting.  Initially Danny Wilson and then later a team of 3 took over the ownership duties.  The team of 3 included Michael Polesky, Ken Deifik and I believe Robert Gaustad.  Michael quickly became the last man standing and ran the list for years with the assistance of Jonas Karlsson and a small team of volunteers called harp-l-workers.
 
Our Garply hosting became less reliable as the company's interests, ownership  and focus shifted.  If you peruse the archives you'll notice a gap.  That gap was generated by a Garply disk crash.  Michael personally paid to have the disk replaced in a era when a replacement disk for a DEC Alpha was close to a thousand dollars.  Years later Michael paid to have the 2nd Garply disk data recovered when it was shipped to me loose in a box damaging the drive.  All of the harp-l archives including the gap era were recovered.  The reason they are not currently up is they have formatting issues.
 
>From Garply we moved to a new host whose name currently escapes me. We did acquire the use of the name harp-l.com at that time.  Dave Gage generously obtained the domain name and paid those fees for years for us. Our hosting was unreliable.  We were off line for a couple of months twice.  Membership being loyal we always bounced back but it cost us. Other resources became available and harp-l has never again been as prolific as it was during the Garply era.
 
I've been involved with harp-l since the WKU era.  I became involved with the harp-l-workers group during the Garply era and during the middle of the Michael Polesky era I was in many senses the person running harp-l. Frustrated with our hosting I teamed with Ben Nathanson another long time harp-l member to find a better more reliable way to keep harp-l afloat.
 
We ended up acquiring the harp-l.org domain name and used it to test hosting sites .  We got lucky and our second hosting choice, rimuhosting ended up working perfectly for us.  We set up parallel lists using the 2 domain names.  This way we were able to beta test the new system while still maintaining the old list.  We switched from our long time mail list software, Majordomo, to our current system Mailman.
 
On July 30, 2004 harp-l was finally hosted on its own server with control over every aspect of the system.  We own the domain names thanks to Keith Graham and Dave Gage who generously allowed us to acquire them.  We are no longer SPAH supported, we've been independent since the server switch.
 
So thanks to Chris Pierce our founder and each and every one of you who helped along the way.  That a student run internet list started before we had web browsers still exists today is more than a minor miracle.

harp-l-listowner