H-MAIL*.TXT

One feature of the old HMVH Corporation BBS was its collection of text-based humour.

Grabbed off Usenet, RsaNET, TopNet, FidoNet, BBS message boards and elsewhere, the BBS carried a melange of jokes, essays, musings, top-10 lists, limericks, taglines, weirdness, tall tales, urban legends, nuggets of wisdom, and general absurdities beyond the regular funnies -- many of which got dutifully assembled into vast and largely chronological collections.

What gives these compendiums a degree of historical significance today is that they provide a glimpse into what it was that amused, worried and intrigued the general online community in halcyon days gone by. They allow for insight into events which inspired people to sit down, write these things up, and post them in the first place.

The collections bear witness not only to the same old jokes that kept getting updated and re-told (Vietnam War veterans became Bosnian War veterans) and re-posted countless times ("IBM mouse ball replacement instructions"), they also provide a window of earlier days of competing computing technologies (Amiga vs. DOS vs. Windows vs. OS/2 vs. Macintosh vs. Unix vs. NeXT) and the inevitable clashes between rivalling fanboy users. It was therefore inevitable that Bill Gates, Windows 95/98, Intel, IE4 as well as OJ Simpson, Dan Quayle, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, the Macarena, and South Africa's emerging democracy ended up as the popular butt of many a joke -- but not before technology was reduced to piles of smoking rubble in the wake of the Y2K bug.

A total of 27 such collections were created between 1995 and 2000. One has disappeared in the great bitbucket in the sky, the remaining 26 have now found a final resting place here (after negligible edits).

This is six years of zeitgeist and history as told through humour.

Warning! Some content may be considered offensive by sensitive readers.


FILENAME EXT  ORIGSIZE   ORIGDATETIME
 
H-MAIL01 TXT   101,444   09-02-1995 19:52
H-MAIL02 TXT   102,152   17-02-1995 13:31
H-MAIL03 TXT   100,061   18-02-1995 03:52 
H-MAIL04 TXT   100,000   25-04-1995 08:03 
H-MAIL05 TXT   101,432   25-04-1995 21:22
H-MAIL06 TXT   100,756   14-07-1995 23:00 
H-MAIL07 TXT    99,390   14-07-1995 23:00     
H-MAIL08 TXT   100,285   17-07-1995 23:00      
H-MAIL09 TXT   100,192   17-07-1995 23:00
H-MAIL10 TXT   100,051   17-07-1995 23:00      
H-MAIL11 TXT   199,991   13-09-1995 23:00       
H-MAIL12 TXT   200,371   13-09-1995 23:00     
H-MAIL13 TXT   200,066   22-09-1995 19:52      
H-MAIL14 TXT   200,081   12-10-1995 02:13     
H-MAIL15 TXT   200,918   13-10-1995 03:42      
H-MAIL16 TXT   200,000   15-10-1995 09:47      
H-MAIL17 TXT   200,000   15-10-1995 15:22      
H-MAIL18 TXT   200,636   23-10-1995 22:45      
H-MAIL19 TXT   200,131   11-11-1995 11:18      
H-MAIL20 TXT   200,000   29-11-1995 20:28      
H-JOKE21 TXT   500,027   15-09-1996 05:46      
H-JOKE22 TXT   500,213   30-12-1997 11:19      
H-JOKE23 TXT   500,496   15-08-1998 23:00      
H-JOKE24 TXT   500,212   15-08-1998 23:00      
H-JOKE25 TXT   500,778   19-10-1998 23:00      
H-JOKE26 TXT   500,656   14-05-2000 23:00      
H-JOKE27 TXT   579,286   29-06-2000 23:00      

              26 File(s)      6,088,847 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  38,332,223,488 bytes free

DOS prompt



This page last updated: 10-02-2011 | Related blog post