Message #54725 From Tachyon, 4-17-88, 15:31

Last words and first words ...

The Stuart II message base is now back in its proper tree format, almost seven months to the day after it went down. Knowing Nick as the kind of guy who put captions, signs and printouts everywhere and on everything, it surprised me that he had not left any "This is the last Stuart message", or "I am shutting Stuart down now" message as an observance or gesture when he took Stuart II offline last August. Knowing myself as often unable to leave well enough alone, I am leaving this message and therefore not surprising myself.

There will probably be later messages about how the Stuart message base came back to life in this format, what this new BBS is about, and so on, but for now I'll just give you an observation: Watching the message base return to shape over the last few days has given a good workout to my senses of irony and visting a changed place. Irony arises when reading such messages as the "Stuart will be offline by '88" subtree and the membership messages which showed the last non-lifetime memberships expiring in April. "Visiting a changed place" (I'm sure there's a better name for it but haven't thought of it yet) is the kind of feeling I get when going by some place I used to live or frequent, making remarks like "my room used to be there", "this used to be a pizza parlor I went to a lot" and "I used to get a lot of books here but it looks really different now".

Well, I'm going to try (one thing I haven't tested yet) saving this now, and the message base will once again be on the move. Stuart as of the shutdown contained about 6500 messages, which takes up just over 4 megabytes in the Pyrzqxgl format. See you around ...

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