About the comp.sys.apollo archive

The archive of comp.sys.apollo was commenced in November 1989, and by February 1994 when it was made accessible via WWW it contained about 13,000 articles.

Index files are kept containing selected header lines for all articles, 100 per file. The headers included are

You can search for articles with specified keywords or substrings in the From, Subject, Summary and Keywords fields. These fields plus Date and Lines will be displayed where there is a match. You can then retrieve a whole article, or look at the headers for the thread of a selected article, that is, those articles which refer to its message-ID.

You may search for keywords, substrings, or a mixture of both. A keyword must match on word boundaries, that is, it must appear preceded and followed by non-alphanumeric characters or the beginning or end of the article header. A substring may appear anywhere in the header fields. Characters in the keyword or substring must match exactly, except that case is not significant.

Searching is carried out by a Perl script. It stops searching either after finding 5 matches, or after scanning headers of about 1000 articles. In either case you are given the opportunity to continue searching (unless no articles are left). Next time, the search will commence at the point where it left off. This mechanism provides a limit both on CPU time used by the server, and on network traffic.

Similarly, when you retrieve an article, it will be presented in batches of lines each around a screen in length; you will be offered more if the article does not fit into the first batch.

You can return to the archive search page.


JSR, Sydney Mathematics and Statistics, 23 Feb 1994 . . . SiteSearch