Bill,
It is no fault of yours that you are new to this.

Yes, long posts were always shortened because of the long load times,
but those of us running tty hardware or maybe an ADM2 were also running
Netnote on an IBM 7090 or later 360 and other Unix mail clients.

"Scrolling" was not possible (you might go down page, up going back up
was not happening). Yes - you could append then but in our groups
(largely defense industry suppliers) a note added this way would often
be missed because the tty people would not print the complete thread to
read the new note and the dumb terminal people would have to run in
psuedo (make the terminal almost smart by using core time at real time).

So, everyone that was interested would read messages as posted, these
massages had the prior massage attached so the reader knew which message
this was a response to. You did not want to have to print or bar
through something you had already read just to get to the new note.
The notes were always kept brief and if supporting data was required,
provision was made to transmit it from a node address (the forerunner of
an ftp).

Mind you please, I was an impressionable young man working among people
that had multiple PhDs at this time. I was also instructed that such
format was used because it was most like the industry internal paper
work form where any response is attached to the top of the circulated
document. But Hey - Nixon had just been inaugurated and most programs
were carried around on punch cards and had to batched at night.

The following is a real question and not intended as any kind of a slam
to any contributor or reader:

If "top posting" is so gauche, why do virtually all the mail clients
do this | ???
V
wrote:

Matt Colie
Matt Colie wrote:

Well d,
I'm not at all fasiliar with the other cultural references, but top
posting was the original fashion and only changed because some AH in
Redmond reset the default to differentiate their mail client from the
all the prior exsisting code.
The nice thing about old tried and true top posting format is that, if
you run one of the good clients that will do a message window, you can
read the top line as soon as you key on the title. You do have to
change windows and scroll down endlessly to get the the message were the
MSAH left it.
During the DARPAnet days discussions would go on for months and the
whole message had to be loaded or printed to read the bottom. We had
high speed 300 baud modems and 60cps printers.
Technology is be better, but I still don't like to have to scroll to the
bottom (where the begining should be) to read the latest entry.
Matt Colie (been here too long)

d parker wrote:


A world wide culture war eh? Did I blink and miss something? What a
load of extremist crap. We are in no culture war. What we have a
multitude of happy societies enjoying multiculturism at its best.
However there are a few morons that are racist and bigoted who like
to beat up on fellow humans for no reason.




Crap!

I have been involved since 1972 with Arpanet and its subsequent
derivations and top posting has always been considered il-mannered. As
is failing to snip lengthy posts.

Try again ignoramus.

Uncle Bill - Commander USN (retired)