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HISTORY

                                                November 2, 1994
A brief history of the doomfile
(now, "the doomfiles"):

The doomfile was originally conceived
(in the late 80s) as an attempt at           The node that was
writing a hypertext implemented only         originally at the
as a plain text file.                        top of the file has
                                             since been renamed
It was intended to push the limits of        DESPERATE.
what I'd seen done with a genre that
might be called the "File Without Read
Protection".  Back then there was one
main system (many machines on one         We all communicated with each
networked file system) at Stanford        other via some local usenet
that all Stanford types had access to.    newsgroups (which formerly were
These people were the intended            TOPS-20 "bboards").
audience.
                                              USENET
The intended viewer for
the doomfile was Emacs.
The long distance
hypertext jumps were
intended to be done just        I forced searches to be
by doing text searches          case-sensitive with some
on keywords indicated in        codes at the bottom of
uppercase.                      the file.

                                             Specifically, these codes:

You may still see some archaic		     Local Variables:
references to those days here in             mode:picture
this new edition of the doomfile.            truncate-lines:non-nil
Someday I'll probably strip them             case-fold-search:nil
all out.                                     next-screen-context-lines:2
                                             End:
All of this explains why I
once felt the need to write                         I used to think
an emacs tutorial...                                this was a really
                                                    neat trick.  Too bad
           EMACS                                    it's a security hole
                                                    (similar to the problem
                                                    with MS Offal macro
                                                    viruses).

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