Sorry for contributing to the spam level, but you have to break an egg, etc. I promise that if anybody replies, I won't reply to the classiccmp list. There are hundreds of people on this list; most post infrequently, if at all. It seems that 5% of the list have a hair trigger that demands that they respond to every message. That would be fine, but it seems like at least 50% of such messages are WAY OFF TOPIC. Yes, I'm shouting, and yes I'm making up numbers. All of these hundreds of people are very smart and know many things. Most of the sense to exercise some self control and not jump in at every opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge, or worse, their unsupported opinions. The ONLY thing that gives cctalk value is that it has a charter. There are untold avenues on the internet if you want to have free ranging discourse. Before you hit send on your next message to cctalk, ask yourself these intertwined questions: (1) Why am I not sending this as a private reply? Is it just your ego wanting to be seen as a smart person that needs a large audience? If John Public says cheese tastes bad, send John Public a private message if you want to tell him he is wrong; the rest of us don't need to know about it. (2) What new information is this message offering? Is it worth the time of 600 people (or whatever) even if all they need to do his scan the subject line and hit delete? This isn't IRC, so hopefully posts will be more thoughtful than that. (3) Is this message still about classic computers? Yes, the guy you are responding to might have thought it was OK, but that doesn't mean it was. Fight the drift. If you must reply, see #1. (4) If you still can't help yourself, do the next best thing, a practice that has seems to have disappeared. Reply with your marginal response, then add some on-topic tidbit to at least give a little nourishment to the list. "Obligatory classiccmp content: blah blah" for example. (5) Even if you ignore #1-#4, recognize subject drift and change the subject line. The "scanning formats" thread, which started on-topic, is now an umbrella for six different (mostly off-topic) threads. Yup, some of those off-topic threads had interesting content, but this is not the forum for it. If you want to argue it, then imagine if everyone who was into photography wanted to talk about interesting techniques, or everyone interested in politics wanted to talk about interesting power plays and developments, etc, etc.