The following is a brief history of the Dinosaur Mailing List (DML) to help you understand something of who we are and how we got here.
If you'd like additional insight into the nature of the list, please feel free to browse the archives. The most easily accessed archives are housed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s web site:
The Proto-DML
The list was created in 1993 by John Matrow at NCR. The purpose of the list was to promote exchanges on scientific issues relating to dinosaurs. The list was housed on NCR computers and managed “by hand” during 1993. Near the end of that year the list had grown to the point that John was not able to continue managing it, so he asked the subscribers if anyone would be willing to take over administration. At the time I (Mickey Rowe) was a foolish Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I was administering an RS6000 in Penn’s Department of Psychology, and that machine could easily handle the e-mail traffic. I volunteered to manage the list. I installed a public domain version of listproc and officially took over the list on February 1, 1994. At the time there were about 250 subscribers, and we were getting a few messages per day, mostly from interested “amateurs”.
All Things in Moderation
Some of the subscribers to the list were professional paleontologists, however, and they began to spread the word. By the fall of 1994 the list had over 500 subscribers and was now sometimes getting as many as 30 messages per day -- still mostly from amateurs, but a fair number were from our small cadre of professional paleontologists. By the fall of 1995 the list was approaching 700 subscribers, some of whom were quite prolific. As traffic sometimes exceeded 100 messages per day, the demands on my RS6000 were becoming too much for it to bear even though we started losing subscribers who weren’t able to keep up with the traffic. In the winter of 1996, I felt something needed to be done to rein the list in, so I held a vote to see what people thought of the idea of my moderating the list. Although it wasn’t a landslide, the vote went in favor of moderation, and so moderation began here on February 13, 1996.
California Here I Come
In the summer of 1996, knowing that I would soon be leaving the University of Pennsylvania, I found another home for the list at the University of Southern California. I asked Sam McLeod to host the list because he was the owner of VRTPaleo, the vertebrate paleontology mailing list also at USC. Since USC also runs listproc for mailing list management, I felt this was a good place to house the list. I didn’t want to take the list with me because I was moving to another temporary position (at Indiana University), and I wanted to give the list a permanent home.
Even Moderation in Moderation
Concurrently with the machinations to move the list to USC, I looked for someone else to run the list. Like John Matrow before me, I found the list a difficult burden to carry given that it was not exactly part of my job description. I almost managed to give the list away, but failed because the organization to which I hoped to donate the list failed itself. In trying to set up the transfer, however, I tried to find out how little time I could put into the list, and so on January 20, 1997, shortly less than a year after I started moderating the list I reverted it back to its prior form. Since then listowners have not had the benefit of being able to screen messages before they are distributed and thus cannot prevent messages from getting through except by telling the listprocessor to ignore e-mail from particular individuals.
The Thoroughly Modern DML
With that switch away from moderation I began working on enforcing rules retroactively as originally laid out in a message I sent just before moderation ended. In June of ’97 I formalized rules which were first distributed on July 1, 1997 along with other information about how to manage subscriptions to the DML. The rules have evolved over time; the current version can be found at the “administrivia” link above (or right here).
The Phantom Mary
Back around the time that moderation began, a new, sinister force arrived on the dinosaur list (February 27, 1996 to be exact). At first the presence did not show herself publicly, but on April 5, she began testing the waters. She remained (for the most part) silently watching us, studying for signs of weakness. From whence she hails no one really knows. Some say she was cloned from one of my ribs, but documentation of this event is lacking. Anyhoo, found weaknesses she did in noting what an ego I have... who can forget these immortal words from February 1998: “invoking Mickey’s name with a question is not yet a universal insult.” From there it was only a matter of time before she’d wrested some of the control from me as made official in January of 1999. And thus from that day forward have M & M ruled the list with an iron hand in a velvet glove.
Steady as She Goes...
As for subscribership, the list has remained at a dynamic equilibrium of around 550 - 600 subscribers since around 1996. The number of subscribers seems to fluctuate seasonally (if you’re interested in seeing how the numbers change over time, write to me; I haven’t extracted the information from my files, but I have a fair amount of data on the number of subscribers at different times, and could probably make a nice graph...). Readers we know of hail from all around the world, and there is also a large (and thoroughly uncounted) group of people who read the list through the web-based archives without actually subscribing.
We hope you have enjoyed this trip down DML memory lane. Today is April 1, 2002. Really.
This page is part of the official DML web space, and hence is covered by our Terms of Use statement.
This page was last edited on April 30th, 2007, and it has received 506 hits from unique IP addresses since then.
© Mickey P. Rowe & Mary Kirkaldy, 2000-2007