LRO

Bill Caloccia is the moving force behind the [Land Rover Owner Mailing Lists]. He has kept the thing going through thick, spam, flame wars, crashes, hacks, and thin. 2000 is the tenth anniversary of the LRO list(s) and Bill marked the anniversary by recapping some history:

19 May 2000

I started the Land Rover Owner's mailing list as a means to gather a few network-attached Land Rover owners together. In 1990 the last officially imported Land Rover was then 17 years old. Those of us who had managed to find one were usually dealing with vehicles that we had not seen before, and were [20+ years old]. In the mid-eighties rec.autos was the lively place, but then UseNet became 'popular' and the quality of discussions suffered - people created mailing lists. Rec.Autos.Sport became driving schools, autox, rallye, and the marque mailing lists gained popularity and 'Team.Net' was born.

At the time, I was responsible for the Rallye mailing list, which was an interesting combination of a BitNet and Internet list, and found my first Land Rover. The Land Rover Owners were far outnumbered by sporty Little British Convertible (LBC) owners on the 'British-Cars' list (also part of the Team.Net family), and likewise lost in the noise of Ford, Chevy, Jeep and Dodge owners on the Offroad mailing list. It was well before there was the 'World Wide Web' as we now know it. To the scattered LRO anoraks it seemed owners and clubs were few and far between in North America.

At this point, I should thank my former employer, Stratus Computer for hosting the fledgling list through the first half of the decade, and [Sun Microsystems, Inc.] (internetworking lab) for providing resources through the latter half of the decade.

In the earliest years readership struggled to reach 100 or so, but the mass market ISPs caught on, and ``newbies'' arrived by the boat-load, as did the first commercial SPAM (unsolicited commercial e-mail). With more users - including Range Rover Owners, and international readers more lists were created, then came web-archives, and web pages. There are some more developments underway, mostly web based, features which should be rolled out in the next few weeks. The new services are being built upon Open Source software (OpenACS, Postgres, Linux) hosted on a custom built 500MHz Pentium III (256MB ram, 34GB disk, tape drive, etc.) in a state-of-the-art co-location facility (with some thanks to my current employer, iBelong, Inc. :-). Thanks to Amaranth Networks with the hardware, and Gerald Ruderman of OpenForce.net for the pointer and assistance with the OpenACS package. The url for the new services is [http://Works.Team.Net/] - there are some basic services working On-Line Chat, Classified Ads, Calendaring - with more to come. If you happen to be familliar with Phil Greenspun's [http://photo.net] or other ArsDigita projects, the functionality should be familliar.

Also thanks to the many folks who have helped occasionally by minding the lists while I've been away, especially Bruce Curtis of Sun Microsystems, as well as those who have assisted in the translations of documents for the foreign language lists (German, Dutch, Spanish, Aussie :-) or are participating in monitoring the lists and assisting other users.

In the past decade Land-Rover.Team.Net has brought together many more people, from far more distant places. In this period, I was also fortunate to relocate to the U.K. for a while, and to participate the very active club scene, and then to travel the globe for work. The best part of this past decade for me has been the opportunity to meet with many of you, from Newcastle N.S.W, Au. to Edinburgh, Ocean City to Ottawa, Santa Clara to Shropshire and Cologne. Thanks so very much for your hospitality.

To all, thanks for your patience while the list has gone through many periods of low or no maintenance and message munging, and also thank you for pretty much keeping the lists on-topic; which is what helps to keep them useful and a valuable communications channel.

I can't say I expected to be running this list 10 years on, and there have been a number of times when it would have been far easier just to pull the plug. My crystal ball isn't any clearer than one of those crazed, semi-opaque turn signal lenses on my first Series IIA, but whether your Land Rover enthusiasm remains or wanes, I hope the next decade is [even] better than the last.

Cheers, -Bill

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