H-MAIL*.TXTOne 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 This page last updated: 10-02-2011 | Related blog post
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