From: justin@inmet.camb.inmet.COM (Justin du Coeur MKA Mark Waks)
Subject: History of the Rialto
Organization: The Internet
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 22:54:09 GMT

Greetings unto the Rialto from Justin du Coeur!

Well, I'm clearly a confirmed Rialto Geek. (Using some very conservative
numbers for the "how many times have you seen this thread" questions (in
particular, limiting question 10 to 5 points -- I think we've hit
Peerage restructuring a dozen times or more), I get a score of 44 points
on Yaakov's test. Of course, I have a bit of an advantage, being the
keeper of the SSS roster...)

Anyway, I figured I'd chime in briefly on Bertram's questions,
to distract me from learning Ada for a few minutes:

>  o When the SCA newsgroup first started
> 
>  o What it was originally called
>
>  o How many original participants were there (and who?)
>
>  o The time-frame of the name debate (ditto the 'bit of net' "badge")
>
>  o Any "famous" folk who used to be Rialtans but are not now
>
>You get the idea...  Enlighten those of us who weren't around from the
>very beginning about how things got started.

Okay, here a Quick Nutshell History of the Rialto, off the top of my head:

(Caveat -- it's been a few years, so don't consider this all to be
gospel truth. It's the way I remember it...)

The Rialto-as-we-know-it was created by Lord Danulf Donaldson, sometime
in 1987. I believe that it grew out of an SCA discussion at DEC, but
Danulf turned it into an Internet mailing list. There was a definite
"startup" period, *heavily* dominated by Carolingia, and then word
started to spread fast. Yes, we *did* go through a "Hi, my name is"
discussion, and, in fact, the custom for the first year or two was
for people to introduce themselves when they came on to the list. I
believe that I joined around 3-5 weeks after the list was opened to 
the Net.

The mailing list was originally a simple reflector, sending each message
out to everyone as it was received; things stayed this was for several
months as the membership went from a few dozen to a couple hundred. Things
got pretty voluble pretty fast. As I recall, the early discussion tended
to be dominated by Dani of the Seven Wells, Arval, and myself; William
de Corbie joined not long after. Collectively, we were probably making
up a third or more of the volume, and were probably instrumental in
making a bunch of people ask that we switch over to a digest format.
(I particularly remember one week when about 75% of the volume was
Dani and me arguing about dance, before everyone else got completely
fed up and convinced us to take it to email.)

The switch to digests came sometime in '88; I think that it was fairly
early in the year, but I'm not certain. There was some modest argument,
but most people preferred the digest format to the reflector.

Not too long after that, we started talking about gating the group
to Usenet. The discussion took a *long* time, and we set up a private
mailing list to talk about it for a little while. (I recall Arval,
Kwellend, David le Casse, and of course Danulf being particularly
active in the debate.) We thought about going for a full-fledged
newsgroup, but were a bit put off by the work involved in creating
a newsgroup properly. The idea was put forth (maybe by me; I forget)
of putting the group into the then-pretty-new alt. hierarchy, and
that got bruited back and forth a bit. Eventually, I believe the
issue got short-circuited when Matt Crawford created alt.sca, and
we decided to gateway to that.

Somewhere in here, there was a moderately long, fairly low-key
discussion of what to call the group; the idea of the Rialto was
put forth (I can never remember whether it was Malice or Kobayashi
who suggested it), and everyone seemed to like it, so it was
adopted pretty much by consensus.

A year or two later, we decided that we wanted the improved
connectivity that a full-fledged newsgroup would bring. There was
a long discussion of what to call it; I recall someone organizing
a straw ballot, giving something like twenty possible names. rec.org.sca
won pretty substantially, although several other options were fairly
popular. We held the vote, and got the group created; that was all
pretty smooth.

It was around this time that the two SCAnets started talking to each
other. Around the time that Danulf was creating the Internet list,
Simon des Beaux Eaux created the MEDIEVAL echo on Fidonet. The two
were separate for a long time, although we very vaguely knew about
each others' existence. After some years, Simon proposed that the
two groups be gated to one another. There was a bit of controversy,
because MEDIEVAL was a bit broader in its charter than the Rialto,
and several people (notably Danulf) didn't want to see the Rialto
overwhelmed with discussion of other groups. So Simon created an
SCA echo on Fido, and that got (gradually and rather erratically)
gated to the Rialto. I believe that there's more complexity than that
to the Fido/Rialto link, but I believe most of that is individual
Fido sites gatewaying themselves...

That's most of the major high points, I think.

As for famous people no longer with us, I can't think of many. There
are a few high-profile Rialtans who are less active now (eg, Dani),
but we've never had all that many "famous" people talking, and all
of the ones that I can think of are still present (although some are
less active than they used to be). Most of the "famous" Rialtans (in
the sense of well-known on the Rialto) who have left for some reason
have managed to find their way back (eg, William, Tadhg)...

				-- Justin du Coeur, Historian
				   Who would be far more accurate if
				     he bothered to look into his archives,
				     but who really doesn't have time...

Random Quote du Jour:

Re: The Joys of Brewing
"Little known fact: when mead explodes, some of the mead converts directly
 to energy; then a secondary conversion turns that back into matter in the
 form of little pellets of glass, accounting for the _tremendous_ volume
 of glass pellets in proportion to the original size of the bottles."
		-- Terry Nutter
From: Tim@f4229.n124.z1.fidonet.org (Tim)
Sender: FredGate@ocitor.fidonet