Re: Archives

[dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)]

-> > If you refer to them often, and carry a set around with you, you'd
-> > appreciate a smaller version.  about 2/3 of any given months mail

 My EFI textbase contains selected, trimmed, and edited messages since
1988, from BIX, CIS, rec.autos.tech, and the hotrod, fangle, gmecm, gn,
syty, fordnatics, vettes, 2stroke, dsm, efi332, and other mailing lists,
plus email.  Plus notes and information snagged from various print
sources that I've keyed in.  11+ years' worth all together.

 It's a little over 4Mb of straight ASCII text.

 Yes, I have a *lot* of time in it, but the compression factor is worth
it in my opinion.  It took time to massage it, but that's time I save
every time I don't have to go digging through 500Mb of crap looking for
some piece of information I think I saw go by four years ago...


 But, hey, at least DIY and gmecm have *real* archives.  Several lists
I'm on don't - they have web-based search engines.  You dial up, connect
to the web server with a browser, and submit a search request.  The
engine blaps back anything with your keywords in it - one at a time,
click and wait.  It's like peeking through a knothole, and it has to be
done in real time.  Most of the people on those lists think it's just
wonderful, and can't seem to understand that is not an archive.  An
archive is where you can load the damned thing in your viewer or editor
and read it as a flat file.  <sigh>