Speaking for myself only, of course... I generally identify the source of my major obstacles in the classic computer enthusiast world as being my age. I enjoy reading the harrowing tales of field service techs here (in fact I've archived them...), the little anecdotes from people involved in os/system design on the PDP's, etc. But it's hard for me to fully relate, since my first "real" computer was an Atari, and I was 11 years old. To be honest, the "old salty" group that has been the friendliest and most willing to share their wealth of knowledge has been the HP3000 crowd...which is nice because information on the classic 3K systems is almost *nonexistant* on the web. Which brings me on to the subject at hand. I'm sure there are others like me, who have almost no word-of-mouth contact with systems. I'm pretty much on my own, relying on the few books I can afford (@%#! speculators...) and the willingness of the experienced members of online groups, like this list, to put up with my inexperience and my ignorant questions to help out where I'd otherwise not know where to start. Here's how I find anything for classic computers: ------------------------------------------------ Look on 5 or 6 different search engines. Search Dejanews. Post questions to this list and/or appropriate mailing lists/newsgroups. Look on eBay/Haggle/etc for possible books. Besides the web, mailing lists and newsgroups, events like the VCF are great. And perhaps people on this list who frequent swapmeets which are frequented by other classic computer enthusiasts would be willing to have a little stack of flyers sitting on a corner of their table. I keep every scrap of info that passes over my gills archived and indexed, since I view whatever I manage to extract as invaluable, and I constantly surprise people I meet who are using classic systems by telling them that there is free software/os/pc utilities/etc available on the internet for their systems. Early morning rambling, still jittery after my bookshelves fell down from the earthquake last night... Aaron

Upon the date 11:06 AM 10/16/99 -0400, CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com said something like: I know myself that I've not found _all_ of the PDP-11 and uVAX resources. I've noticed some webpages, for example, never come up in any search engine because the owner hasn't indexed their page properly or at all. I can search till I'm blue in the face and miss stuff. Also, slogging through dozens and dozens of 'hits' that are HTML-based is not at all fun when you've got a limited time budget and only a 48k BPS connection (yeah, only a couple of years ago that was considered blinding _fast_!). Many important resources, which I'd think were searchable, I've found simply by other ClassicCmp list members mentioning them here. I've seen antique radio, computer collectors and ham radio pages that have a nice section dedicated to interesting links. By asking the relevant collector/enthusiast webpage owners to place a link to your http://www.trailing-edge.com/www/freeware.html page on their site will help toward your goal of "getting the word out". Maybe you can setup a page of interesting links as an exchange with those folks who link to your freeware page. Sellam's VCF pages seem to be one of the magnets a search engine nails (amongst several other's pages from ClassicCmp) and would be one of the important sites to link to your freeware. Misguided? Certainly not! Many of us want to freely share our knowledge with folks who want to learn about similar systems. Whenever I am able to I am very enthusiastic about sharing info. It's just I'm not that organized at present to comprehensively share my archives :( Indeed. And it seems those not "in the know" who are members of the list, plus outsiders who hear of us, do seek the knowledgeable folks on the list for advice. Links from collector's pages and heavy hits from search engines helps broaden the reach that you are seeking Tim. Regards, Chris -- -- Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net Member of Antique Wireless Association URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/