Talk:LISTSERV

Creator

Someone has edited this page to revert to a reference Eric Thomas as creator of listserv--an error that had been corrected several months ago. The historical evidence supporting the Fuchs/Oberst/Hernandez authorship of listserv is widely distributed and authoritative. See, e.g.,

http://www.livinginternet.com/l/li.htm

http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=0471052604&Search_Code=STNO&PID=12170&SEQ=20070208104103&CNT=25&HIST=1

Dan Oberst passed away in late 2006; however, Ira Fuchs and Ricky Hernandez survive, as do many other early Bitnet and EDUCAUSE pioneers who confirm the collaborative creation of the original. Fuchs confirms the triple authorship in a personal communication. Thomas's claims have no independent confirmation that I could discover.

I could find no source that disputes Thomas's crucial role in improving and popularizing listserv; the only dispute involves the original authorship, and that dispute is Thomas v. all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjmackie (talk • contribs) 12:56, 9 February 2007

Hi, this is Eric Thomas. First time on Wikipedia, I hope I did not make a mess on this talk page.

A lot of people have erroneously claimed that I invented the name LISTSERV, but this is simply not true. As you point out, Fuchs &co did that at BITNIC. What I did invent is the software that I originally called Revised LISTSERV, a blatant trademark violation I suppose, but as a 19-year old French student I was totally clueless about the US legal system. Revised LISTSERV was an independent development, in fact I did not even have the code for the BITNIC LISTSERV. Because BITNIC abandoned their LISTSERV and installed mine in 1987, people dropped the "Revised" and called my product just "LISTSERV," and eventually I did the same thing. The historical announcement is still online at:

http://www.listserv.dfn.de/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind8701&L=NODMGT-L&P=R2&I=-3

The BITNIC LISTSERV, as it existed when I wrote Revised LISTSERV, was roughly comparable to a sendmail alias for IBM mainframes. To join or leave a list, you wrote to INFO@BITNIC, a mailbox manned by Judith Molka and Scott Earley, and you explained what you wanted in plain English. They edited the list in LISTSERV manually. The main improvement in Revised LISTSERV was the ability to send commands to LISTSERV to join or leave the list, likewise the concept of a list owner (other than the system administrator) who could add or remove subscribers, edit templates for welcome messages and other system messages, etc. After I released my software, the BITNIC LISTSERV was improved to support similar functions, but as noted it was abandoned about six months after I released Revised LISTSERV, so few people remember its existence. This is why so many people will tell you that I coined the name, but I did not. I did invent the concept of an automated mailing list manager, though.

There are quite a few factual inaccuracies in this reference:

http://www.livinginternet.com/l/li.htm

I wrote LISTSERV in 1986, not 1996. I did not work at CERN at the time; I was a student in Paris (and in 1996 I worked at SUNET in Stockholm). The LOC URL does not work, so I cannot check it. As a rule, I have found that online information about BITNET and other "net happenings" in the 80s is often inaccurate when it has not been written on the basis of actual, original documents from the 80s (which are often not online). A journalist writes an article on a tight deadline that someone reads and uses to write a paper for his studies, and someone else quotes that. Where LISTSERV is concerned, the unedited archives of LSTSRV-L are available all the way back to July 1986 at:

http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A0=LSTSRV-L

Unfortunately, addresses in older messages (in BITNET format) do not display correctly, but you can still identify who wrote what.

Finally, please note that the LISTSERV trademark is registered to me, not L-Soft. See:

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=d9sj49.2.3

Eric Thomas 13:14, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Eric Thomas is correct in saying that his "Revised LISTSERV" and the Fuchs et al. LISTSERV were completely different things. Despite his use of the term "Revised", the only connection between the two programs was their name and the fact that they were mailing-list-exploders. At the time all this was going on, I knew Ricky Hernandez, Eric, Scott Earley, and a number of the other key participants in the network, and this difference in authorship was accepted by all. The BITNIC group weren't happy that Eric called his program by the name of theirs, but even they eventually saw the wisdom of converting to it. RossPatterson (talk) 17:00, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Dubious marketing claims

LISTSERV is the first and so far the only email list software providing such built-in virus protection. If a virus is detected, the message is automatically rejected.

This sounds like it's straight from the program's marketing materials. I believe a number of mailing list servers provide support for external antivirus tools, which may be a better approach anyway.