Published via Ecency

A summary for those that haven't necessarily been keeping up with this series:

I found a number of 5.25" disks at a thrift store a number of years ago (sometime in the late 1990s to the best of my recollection). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a several years back. Since then, I have been occasionally posting the content here.

Based on the contents, most or all of these disks were apparently once owned by someone named Connie who used to run the “Close Encounters” Special Interest Group (SIG) on Delphi in the mid 1980s.

The following description of this SIG was found in a document on one of the disks: "This SIG, known as 'Close Encounters', is a forum for the discussion of relationships that develop via computer services like the Source, CompuServe, and Delphi. Our primary emphasis is on the sexual aspects of those relationships."

This service was text based and was accessed via a modem and whatever terminal program you had available for your computer to dial in with. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I am not aware of any archives in existence today that contain what was on Delphi in the 1980s.

This post includes the contents of STRANGE.DOC. This is a chat log that was forwarded in an e-mail. The e-mail is dated January 24th, 1985 and the chat log was from the previous night. This seems to be a bit of an argument regarding a love triangle...really more of a rectangle. I don't know who this Marti person was but they must have been pretty damned special.

Periodically, you can see 'The Stranger' (this is his log) issuing a '/w' command. This seems to bring up a list of ongoing chats and who is in them. Just an interesting little tidbit that illustrates some of how Delphi worked back in the day.

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STRANGE.DOC
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