From raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Tue Oct 1 20:35:40 2002
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 12:50:19 +0530
From: Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
To: Lis-Forum
Cc: Meenakshi Gulla ,
Franc ,
S. Filbert Minj ,
Abhijit Lahiri , Sreedevi Ravindran ,
N. Balakrishnan , rajaraman@serc.iisc.ernet.in
Subject: [LIS-Forum] LIS-Forum: A brief history
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Dear All
It is satisfying to note that LIS-Forum has matured into an active
discussion forum today, contributing its bit in networking L&I professionals
in
the country. Currently it has 363 members.
Whatever success it has achieved is due to all of you! Please do give
publicity to LIS-Forum (and other Indian L&I lists) whenever and
wherever possible. Prospective members may be told to visit the
following web page to subscribe to LIS-Forum:
http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum
Now, to a brief history of LIS-Forum -
It was early Internet days (at least in India) in late 1994 that we put
up a proposal to Dr. Lahiri to obtain NISSAT support for setting up
LIS-Forum. We were motivated by a few U.S. based discussion forums like
PACS-L for L&IS. NISSAT readily came forward to support our proposal,
covering a Unix machine and a Project Assistant. Ms. Meenaxi Gulla, a
fresh B.E. Comp.Sci graduate joined the project in early 1995 and
LIS-Forum was successfully set up and made operational by middle of
1995. It operated out of a 486 PC with Unix SVR 4 operating system.
There were very few mailing list softwares available then - we used
Listproc software developed by Anastasios Kotsikonas. I think Listproc
was originally developed for IBM mainframes for BITNET (does anybody
remember BITNET?). It was not an easy software to set up, but we got
through, thanks to perseverance of Meenaxi!
LIS-Forum could not have come into being but for NISSAT support.
THANK YOU - DR. LAHIRI AND THE NISSAT TEAM.
I also thank Prof. V. Rajaraman (Chairman, NCSI till 1994) and Prof. N.
Balakrishnan (Chairman, NCSI, during 1994 to 1999) for the excellent
encouragement and support they gave us.
By end of 1996, we had about 150 members. We shifted to another software
called L-Soft Listserv sometime in 1999 - it had better features, more
robust and worked on Linux, the OS of our new mail server.
I was away at Informatics on sabbatical during 2000 and the management
and moderation of LIS-Forum fell into the safe hands of my colleague
Francis Jayakanth. There were a few hiccups with L-Soft software during
this time. Francis, with help by another colleague Mr. Filbert Minj,
successfully moved the forum to a new free software called Mailman. It
has so far proved to be a very capable mailing list software, with
support for web-based list management and also user interface. It had
intermittent mail looping problems, but it has been sorted out now.
Today, most of LIS-Forum management and moderation is handled by
Francis, with support by Filbert. Let's thank Francis and Filbert for
sustaining LIS-Forum. I intervene only if Francis has any doubts about
the worthiness of broadcasting a particular message.
Once again, we thank all forum members for their support and
cooperation.
With best regards
- Rajashekar
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
Associate Chairman Tel: +91-80-3600271, 3601427
National Centre for Science Fax: +91-80-3601426, 3600683
Information (NCSI) E-Mail: raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
Indian Institute of Science URL: http://144.16.72.189/raja/
BANGALORE-560012 (India)
-------------------------------------------------------------
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The IISc Science Information Portal
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