Jeff Kell writes:

>  As the HP telecast on future directions of the 3000 celebrated the
>  25th anniversary of the platform, the "official" HP3000-L list
>  approaches its 10th anniversary.  Throughout the years of growing
>  pains, there has been a polarized view of the value of the list
>  ranging from "The most valuable resource for HP3000 information" to
>  "An overweight flood of noisy, largely off-topic mailbox fodder." The
>  truth has always somewhere between those two extremes (in my opinion)
>  but there seemed to be no easy compromise between the timely, casual
>  atmosphere of the list "as is" and a stuffy, formal, and reasoned
>  separation of the wheat from the chaff, without the delays associated
>  with printed publications.
>
[snip]
>
>  Some months ago, Interex offered an editor very knowledgeable about the
>  3000 platform to further distill the collective discussion on the
>  HP3000-L list into a compact "summary" format. The editor, Bruce Toback,
>  is a systems consultant and software architect for OPT, Inc.  He
>  develops systems and software for HP 3000, UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows
>  platforms.  After some discussion regarding the delivery format and the
>  availability of the summaries, it was decided that The HP3000-L Summary
>  would be provided on the Interex Web site and be open to the public as
>  is the list/newsgroup itself. We have been through several weeks of
>  private "testing" to see how the final result would look, and I must say
>  that I am quite pleased with the initial results. For whatever my
>  opinion is worth, Interex and Bruce have my full blessings and
>  endorsement; the HP3000-L Summary is a very worthy and valuable resource
>  for those who are overwhelmed by the list.
>
>  I would encourage you to check the summaries for yourself, and, in
>  particular, if you are aware of any users of the "too much noise"
>  opinion, please refer them to the new summaries.  There will be a new
>  link from the Interex home page (http://www.interex.org) as well as a
>  new URL for the HP3000-L Summary on the Interex Web site
>  (http://www.interex.org/3000lsum/3000lsummary.html)
>
>  Enjoy the new features, and my thanks to Interex for their editorial
>  services, which have finally overcome the "signal/noise" blockade for
>  the busy professional.

Let me say that I'm quite impressed with what Interex and Bruce Toback have
done. I think that these executive summaries could become a very useful item
to a great number of people.

If I might make a suggestion has to how summaries might be further improved,
it would be to hyperlink the bold titles of each summary to the relevant
thread(s) to Bruce's very useful HP3000-L webbot. In this way, a person can
read just the summary of the thread -- and still be capable of immediately
pulling down the precise content of the conversation as it appeared, if they
wished more information.

Nonetheless, what's been done so far is quite nice -- and everyone is to be
congratulated for a job well done.

Wirt Atmar