In the beginning, there was a dark void -The secret history behind the SF-LOVERS mailing list

In the beginning, there was a dark void, where computers were 70 ton one-off designs that worked via punch-cards or thousands of toggle switches (aka the vacuum tube era). During the Cold War era, lots of computer research and one-off computer systems got funded by the US government and crazy things like transistors, magnetic tape storage and 5-kb RAM modules weighing 7kg got invented(aka the transistor era).

People at the US Department of Defense got tired of having 5 computer terminals or more in their offices to use the many US government funded computer systems that dealt with national security/cold war research and said "F**K THIS. I want one computer terminal in my office, and I have the funding to make this possible. ANYONE INTERESTED?"

The DARPA, who lost out bigly in the Army/Navy Department of Defense turf-wars over control of funding-dollars for the 1950's various rocketry projects, went all-in on ownership of the "one computer terminal per office/I HAVE FUNDING" proposal, and after much consultation with smart people, and design proposals the ARPANET project was proposed and approved.

The ARPANET project basically invented computer routers(IMP node's) and computer routing, only this was the 1960's-1970's and everything was secret, so IMP's initially only went out to a select few places like major college universities/us govt sites where lots of Cold War related research happened. Eventually IMP nodes went out to other sites, and the ARPANET was born, and so was computer EMAIL.

The ARPANET continued to grow even placing a few IMP nodes overseas, until national security issues and funding concerns popped up, so the MILNET was created to host vital-to-US-national-security data, while the ARPANET continued to host the less critical to national security stuff.

After the ARPANET/MILNET split, the long-term purpose of the ARPANET was being evaluated (should it be commercialized?), meanwhile people using ARPANET email started using email for non-official purposes, and adhoc mailing lists like SF-LOVERS, HUMANS-NET got created on the down-low.

All these adhoc mailing lists were run ontop of 100% US government funded routers and hosted on mostly US government funded computer systems, and were not officially approved by anyone involved in ARPANET management. If people started mentioned mailing lists like HUMANS-NET, SF-LOVERS, etc willy-nilly, word would eventually reach government auditors/Congresspeople/spies/unstable spamming douchebags and the hammer-of-god would come down hard on everyone involved.


tldr: This all happened in the before-before times, when things like Congressional investigations into wastes of tax-payers money mattered. SF-LOVERS and other major mailing list were unofficial/non-approved efforts leeching off of US government funded system resources and networks.