
Happy 25th birthday to the election methods mailing list!!!! This mailing list is also known as “the EM-list”: <https://electowiki.org/wiki/EM25>
Not only is the EM-list old enough to buy cigarettes at the local convenience store, but it’s old enough to buy beer, wine, and hard liquor. It’s also old enough to rent cars in the United States or trucks down at U-Haul without too much of a hassle. 😀
You can learn more about the EM-list on the “EM25” wiki page on electowiki. < That link also has links to important bits of the EM-list archive from February 1996. It _shouldn’t_ be too hard for me to write a script to create a script for other parts of the archive, but that reminds me of the “Programmer’s Credo” posted to twitter.com/pinboard many years ago: (“we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy“).
My first message to this mailing list was February 15. Specifically, it was “Thu Feb 15 21:34:05 PST 1996”, which is 5 seconds after 9:34pm on February 15, 1996. “PST” means “Pacific Standard Time”, which is my current timezone as well as my timezone when I launched EM-list. I was going to try to send a “happy birthday” email at exactly 9:34:05pm, but I got impatient. I’m planning to keep making changes to the EM25 page over on electowiki. Please join me!
- Changelog (reverse chronological changes to this blog post):
- v0.02 — Reformatted my email to EM-list (2021-02-15 at 10:02pm PST)
- v0.01 — Published! (2021-02-15 at 9:49pm PST)