On Mon, 23 Nov 1992 08:42:06 NFT Turgut Kalfaoglu <TURGUT@FRORS12> said:
 
>I see the point  in both cases - the name  "Revised LISTSERV" comes from
>the fact that there  used to be (before my time  :) another LISTSERV (at
>BITNIC?) that  had the right idea,  but Eric improved it  much more with
>his  new server,  so he  called it  "Revised." So,  the _name_  LISTSERV
>existed before Revised Listserv.
 
Maybe I  should clarify  here. The  reason the thing  we now  call BITNET
LISTSERV  was initially  dubbed  "Revised LISTSERV"  is, precisely,  that
there was another  program called LISTSERV; in fact, there  were two, the
"BITNIC LISTSERV" and the "NCSUVM LISTSERV". The reason I did not call my
program XYZSERV  and, indeed, the  reason I wrote it  at all is  that the
people in charge of the original LISTSERV were spending little or no time
improving it due to having other things to do. There was no compatibility
issue since the original LISTSERV did  not accept commands at all, all it
did was receive messages  and send them to lists of  people, ie about the
functionality  of a  SMTP exploder  (shortly after  Revised LISTSERV  was
released, a  new version of the  original LISTSERV with 3-4  commands was
written but it was never released - it only ran at the developer's site).
The  server's helpfiles  made  it  clear that  this  was different  code,
explained what was new and described  how one could interface the 3 types
of servers without creating loops. Nobody ever complained to me about the
ambiguity of the documentation, nor did anyone ask me to rename my server
to something else.
 
All these  historical documents  were removed  a few  years later  as the
original LISTSERV's  had disappeared  completely and user  support people
complained that it confused their users.
 
  Eric