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The ballot list from 30 years ago is an interesting window in time back
to a period when Internet connectivity was mostly academic, military,
and commercial organizations that were affiliated with government
research, due to the origins of the Internet from the original ARPANet
created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

It is also a perspective on the usage profile of early Usenet
newsgroups, as well as the types of organizations that employed STEM
workers and licensed radio amateurs. Many of the industry sites
represented were great American technology companies that are no longer
around, have merged/been acquired, or their business has significantly
changed.

Some like, CSNet and UUNet, represented customers as well as employees,
as they were some of the first commercial Network Service Providers

Nowadays, it is almost unheard of for organizations to run their own
news servers, let alone allow their employees to post to newsgroups
using their employee e-mail addresses. Some older professors may still
remember, but ask a current student about Usenet or the "Eternal
September" and you will likely get a blank stare. Even the original two
server sites of Usenet back in 1979, at Duke and UNC, finally shut down
their local news servers by 2011.

A sampling of top sources and numbers of voters:

Industry:

Digital Equipment Corporation (13)
Hewlett-Packard (10)
CSNet (9)
UUNet (8)
AT&T (5)
Kodak (5)
Sun (5)
SRI (3)
Apple (2)
Fluke (2)
General Electric (2)
Standard Telephones and Cables (2)

Government:

U.S. Army (6)
NASA (5)

Universities:

Texas (5)
Illinois (3)
Berkeley (2)
Chicago (2)
Georgia Tech (2)

My vote appears, from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, having just
enrolled there, received an account on a Unix workstation that connected
to the local news server (also long since defunct), and was using my
beginning skills with the "nn" newsreader and the "vi" editor to fill
out my ballot and e-mail it to the vote taker. By 1995, I was
subscribed to one of the first local commercial ISP's and posting from
there.

Two are even from FidoNet, an early Usenet-like networking technology to
link computer Bulletin Board Services to each other via dialup modems,
and was gatewayed to Usenet and the Internet.

A couple of notable Silent Keys (RIP):

Paul A. Flaherty, N9FZX (Stanford University and later Digital Equipment Corporation)
Brian Kantor, WB6CYT (University of California San Diego)

(73, Paul, K3FU)

- --
Paul W. Schleck


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