Aero-Mail

The "Aero Mailing List" about the Compaq Contura Aero Laptop Computer was brought into life on the 16th of September 1994 by Lew Jansen from the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University, Ithaca (NY). As he wrote in a mail, he was at that time discussing the installation of OS/2 on the Aero with a few people on the net and he was annoyed of coordinating the group replies. So the list got the name aero-l@lassp.cornell.edu and three hours after installation there were already seven aeronauts.

One year later on 14th of September 1995, Reed Wade from the Computer Science Dept., University of Tennessee, Knoxville took over. The list had been inactive for two months before - or may be just the mail wasn't archived any more. At least I have a big gap in the mail-archive I got here: From July, 1st to August, 28th. (Please mail me if you know more.)

Anyway, with Reed Wade the new list got a new adress aero@cs.utk.edu. He himself became quite famous among aeronauts some time after: He managed to install five different OS on the machine, one of them "Plan 9" by Bell Labs. The list was very busy in that time, with 38 mails and more per day.

On 10th of June 1996, Reed Wade announced he had to leave the job. On July, 17th someone new was found: Doug DeJulio. Doug DeJulio made the list not only available through a majordomo list-server but also by a newsserver. And: Both services were provided by an aero under Debian GNU/Linux! Years later (Feb, 2nd '99) he "confessed" his hack to the list.

The "Aero List Newsgroup" started on a domain called "aisb.org" (which stands for "Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria") on January 29th, 1997 and still exists today, while I write this, on October 1st, 2004, although it is pretty silent now. So try it out at news://news.aisb.org/aisb.lists.aero.

On this page you find the archives of the mailing list in various formats, so you can easily import them to your favorite mail-program:

First part: Aero Mailing-List

The first part of the mail-archive covers the time of the mailing-lists from Sept. 1994 - Oct. 1996. There is a big gap between July and August 1995 - please mail me, if you know of the missing mails.

The original mail archives, found at "ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/aero/" some years ago. The address above is defunct now. Zipped, 2 MB.

All those mails in MBX-format. MBX is the standard UNIX-mailbox-format and is used by programs as Thunderbird, Mozilla, Eudora or the (Free) Agent Newsreader. Zipped, 2 MB.

All mails in EML-format. EML ist the Electronic Mail Format which can be used for importing mails to Microsofts Outlook Express VERY easily. Zipped, 4,7 MB.

All mails in PST-format. PST ist the native "Outlook Data File"-Format of Microsoft Outlook: you can just open it from the "File"-menu. Zipped, 4,4 MB.

The second part of the mail-archive covers all mails sent to the newsgroup from Jan. 1997 - Sept. 2004. The newsgroup (and each one of these mails) is still available under news://news.aisb.org/aisb.lists.aero.

So you might better want to check the group itself for those and newer mails. These archives are just provided for easy offline-reading and as a sort of fallback-option. They are pretty big, so on older machines you need some patience for importing... ;-)

The newsgroup in MBX-format.
Zipped, 4,8 MB.

Newsgroup in EML-format.
Zipped, 9,4 MB.

Newsgroup in PST-format.
Zipped, 6,3 MB.

Thunderbird / Mozilla

Outlook Express

Although Outlook Express has an Import-function for Eudora (mails in MBX-format) this doesn't seem to work. Anyway, people suggest a much easier way for importing. The condition is that all mails are saved separately in EML-format into a folder (what I already did for you, using the tool mbox2eml).

Outlook

I already converted the mail- and newsgroup-files to Outlooks native PST (Post)-format, so instead of importing, you just can start opening the files.

Now have fun reading the old reports! Travel back into a time when your machine was shiny, new and expensive, experiments with the aero still meant to risk something and aeronauts were pioneers... ;->