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)

The "LOC URL" by Cjmackie that Eric references does work for me. It identifies a 590 page book "The Internet Navigator" by Paul Gilster., Edition: 2nd ed., Published/Created: New York : Wiley, c1994. ISBN 0471052604. It would be good to add references from it to clarify the article. ★NealMcB★ (talk) 22:27, 8 March 2012 (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. 169.237.10.220 (talk) 22:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. It is hard to believe that LISTSERV was the first to integrate anti-virus. The cited CNN article doesn't support that claim. Integrating anti-virus with an email list application is not hard. If the claim is just that they were the first product to do so, that't just marketing that is unsuitable for Wikipedia. ★NealMcB★ (talk) 23:44, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

this article and wikipedia policy/utility

Does wikipedia have a policy against pragmatism, or a policy or policies that tnd to discourage such? I ask for this reason: is there some reason that this article should not @ least have a link to listserv commands (if not @ least a few of them listed)? I write this because I came to this article looking for listserv commands, and did not find, either them, nor even a link helpful in finding such, and my question is therefore not as patronising and much more innocent than 1 might expect. Truly puzzled:

• Slarty2 (talk) 05:57, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
• 1 slight missuse...totally cool that the inventor (Eric Thomas) wrote in.

Slarty2 (talk) 05:57, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Trademark Violation

The sentences about listserv.org that were inserted under "History" and "Editions" are misleading and amount to a blatant trademark violation. See "Trademark" section. The listserv.org site is in no way associated with L-Soft, L-Soft's LISTSERV software or its LISTSERV mailing lists. It is a completely unrelated message board site that misuses the LISTSERV trademark. The text appears to be an attempt to drive traffic to the site by implying that listserv.org is somehow an official LISTSERV service. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.119.1.218 (talk) 21:19, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

L-Soft

Where is L-Soft based ?. --147.84.132.44 (talk) 13:10, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

8100 Corporate Drive, Suite 350, Landover, MD 20785-2231; with local offices in Stockholm, Sweden; London, UK; and Erlangen, Germany. Mark D Worthen PsyD 07:08, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Capitalization

Should "LISTSERV" be in all caps? Unless its an acronym or initialism, it seems it should be "Listserv," per the Manual of Style. Trivialist (talk) 22:53, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Good point. The Manual of Style/Trademarks is very specific on this issue. Mark D Worthen PsyD 07:39, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

So I forged ahead and changed LISTSERV to Listserv in the article. I sought to be gracious by noting the alternative capitalization preferred by the company, viz., "(written by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV)." I made a similar change from BITNET to Bitnet - please correct if for some reason "BITNET" is correct (I Googled the term and did not find any info). Mark D Worthen PsyD 08:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)