The Transformers Mailing List is Born
April 13, 1993. Two fateful posts changed Internet Transfandom forever. You can read for yourself on Google by looking at these two Usenet Message IDs:
Olatunji Nowlin and Steven Mar decided to put together a Mailing list about Transformers. Ola, at University of Illinois – Chicago, and Steve, a Harvard student, were co-owners of this list, and they posted to both rec.arts.animation andrec.arts.anime advertising this new list. I have a vague feeling that Steve asked me prior to posting if I thought such an idea would work. I don’t know if this is true or simply a delusion of Internet-grandeur, so if I hadn’t been a member prior to this post on Usenet, I immediately joined upon reading it. (I told you this wasn’t going to be an official history….)
The list was off and running, and for those of you who laugh at the quaintness of an E-mail list, remember that this was a different Internet back then. There was no World Wide Web. There were no discussion boards. Chat rooms, if they existed, weren’t made known. There were no TF MUSHes or MUDs. Usenet and gopher were the only ways information was spread, and FTP sites were the repositories of data.
Even so, a mailing may not seem like a big deal in this day and age of majordomo and listserv lists. But when the Transformers Mailing List was started, we didn’t know about such automation. I’m sure they existed; but we were just fans, not technical people. So to send a message to the entire list, the sender typed in every address by hand, did a mass reply to someone else’s E-mail that had reached the entire list, or kept a copy of the distribution list him/herself and referenced that list in some fashion when sending an E-mail.
So Steve and Ola were the two people to formally post about the E-mail list; I also became a bit of an authority figure there, as I made sure to keep an up-to-date list of everyone’s E-mails, in case Steve and/or Ola’s lists got trashed or if they were gone and someone asked for a copy of the list. But really, this was extremely informal. No moderators, no SPAMers, no trolls, just a group of people who liked talking about Transformers. All of us had gone through the original G1 line and had “grown up”, but still kept the love alive. So finding people with whom to talk about Transformers was something we all cherished. This list was a welcome addition to all our lives.
Over time, membership soared as repeated posts on Usenet advertised the list. Generation 2 was a great source of discussion on the list, but the original toys, cartoon, and series were not dismissed. In fact, I remember one day listening to “Dare to be Stupid” repeatedly over the course of an hour or two, writing down the lyrics, simply because someone on the list asked for them. No one had the lyrics handy, so I just did it. That was the spirit that existed there.
Here’s a little bit of trivia for you: I was on the Mailing List and CMTF on Prodigy at the same time, as you could probably tell by the dates involved. Therefore, it was not uncommon for me to cross-post information from the list to CMTF and vice versa. One of the first things I posted to the list in April 1993 was an updated and rewritten version of my fanfic “Reconstruction” that had appeared in slightly different form on CMTF a short time earlier. This very well could have been the first Transformers fanfiction to appear on any form of Internet protocol and possibly any online medium. I don’t remember any fanfic appearing before mine on CMTF or the Mailing List, so this appears to be a valid, if unofficial, claim. (It’s not that big of an honor; at the rate I’ve not worked on “Reconstruction” since 1993, it will also be the last Transformers fanfiction in any online medium, as well.) Fanfic started appearing with great frequency, as many Transfans let their creative sides show.
Outgrowing the List
The list was a great place to be, but it had one main problem: it was unwieldy. Mailboxes tended to overflow with the amount of traffic that would be generated, so those with small disk space had to constantly keep up with each E-mail and delete as quickly as possible. More than once the list would see E-mail failures thanks to overflow. Also, since it was just E-mail messages on text accounts, discussion threads were a bit hard to follow. Probably the biggest problem was keeping the master lists of E-mail addresses up to date and synchronized. Because there was no central automated server, every once in a while, one of us would have to copy the list to an E-mail and send it out, asking people to make a copy for themselves. If people joined or quit, it took a while for these changes to be propagated to everyone’s account.
In light of these problems, discussion soon turned to creating a Usenet newsgroup of our own. There were people on both sides of this argument. The “Pro” side stated a newsgroup would be a lot easier to “maintain”, purely for lack of maintenance needed, and people didn’t have to worry about joining or running out of disk space. The “Con” side said that newsgroup propagation could be a problem, and some people had spotty Usenet news servers — or they didn’t have Usenet access at all. Also, there were the alt.* vs. rec.* and the *.tv.transformers vs *.toys.transformers debates. Plus, there were questions that had to be asked, such as “What was the focus of the newsgroup going to be?” and “Do we want the higher visibility of a rec.* group?”
Time for a confession: I was against a newsgroup.
Hard to believe, I know, but I was one of the people on the “Con” side. My arguments were that my Usenet feed at Marquette University was unreliable at times, and new groups tended to be added without any regularity. One day five new groups would be added. Then no new groups would appear for weeks. Sometimes groups would vanish without warning. Not only that, I didn’t know who to contact to request a group, and even if I did, I was a bit self-conscious about having my love for toys be known.
So, I was against a newsgroup.
Thankfully, I was outvoted. The final consensus was to create a compromise. The newsgroup would be created, but the Mailing List would not be neglected. The list would still be a supplemental source of TF-info for those who were Usenet-less. It would have its own discussion threads, but major newsgroup postings would be forwarded to the list so that everyone would be kept abreast of major Transformers happenings.
And on September 11, 1993, alt.toys.transformers was created. The newsgroup became online Transfandom’s new home, but the Mailing List still was the place for many of us to talk. I didn’t get alt.toys.transformers for quite some time (and, in fact, some time after I had gotten it, it disappeared from my news server and stayed lost for some time. That’s one of the reasons why I was quiet on the newsgroup, and my lurking sort of became habit.). So I kept posting topics to the list, reposted my fanfic, still didn’t continue it.
alt.toys.transformers soon became the place to be. As more and more people received the newsgroup, the Mailing List membership and bandwidth dwindled, until finally, it was just a select few, including myself. And when I gotalt.toys.transformers (for the first time), the list was unofficially disbanded, simply through lack of use.
So the Mailing List lasted a year… maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. It served its purpose well, though. In some ways, though, I still miss it, as it is now a reminder of a time when the noise to content ratio was, well, virtually nil. The nature of an E-mail list in those days meant there were no off-topic posts, no spam, and no flames. It was Transformers all the time. That sort of occurrence is rare on alt.toys.transformers these days.
When I look at alt.toys.transformers and the other newsgroups today, I still see some remnants of the list. Robert Jung, Jameel “MegaBee” al Khafiz, Patricia “Vulcana” Wright, Andrew “Swiper” Frankel, and several others were part of the list at some point and still are on Usenet today. Alas, Steve Mar and Olatunji Nowlin seem to have faded into obscurity…. Perhaps they are lurking as well; if so, I wish they’d drop me a line as well.
The Transformers Mailing List was technically archaic, but it still holds a fond place in my memory. And every once in a while I’m reminded of it when I browse the current messages in my inbox that come from other, newer Transformers mailing lists.
Vela: The First FTP Site
Posts on rec.arts.animation and alt.toys.transformers as well as the Mailing List proved that people wanted Transformers information. But the members of the list didn’t want to keep mailing the same things over and over again. So some central site needed to be set up, a site that could house the most requested information, as well as maybe some other files. Jim Hoxsey decided to take the matter into his own hands, and he created the first Transformers FTP site at vela.acs.oakland.edu. Simply FTP there, switch to pub/transformers, and instantly you had a great repository of TF data. You can see a post about this FTP site by looking up this Usenet Message ID: 1u05irINNa1r@ope001.iao.ford.com
The main item of interest was the first official TF Episode Guide, put together by Aaron Marsh, I believe. Also on the site were pictures, fanfiction, and even the first transcript of an episode, namely Boris Ammerlaan’s “Dark Awakening”.
After a while, other FTP sites started popping up. But Jim’s site was so popular, anyone could refer to it as “Vela” or “Oakland” and more often than not, the Transfan knew exactly was meant. Vela was the first place a fan would check for archival data.
Websites today spend a lot of time creating user-interfaces that make it easy for visitors to point, click, and download data of all sorts. But this created at a time when the most common way to FTP was to use a command line interface. That’s right; you had to know the commands by memory and frequently download to offline viewers to view the data you received.
At some point, vela switched to a machine called saturn, and with the proliferation of other FTP sites and then the World Wide Web, it stopped being the hotspot for Transformers data. It, too, quietly disappeared into memory.
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