←back to thread

98 points jgrahamc | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.456s | source
Show context
mattl ◴[] No.43536228[source]

I used to work at the Free Software Foundation. I would get a lot of letters from prisoners who wanted copies of our books, people asking for a printed copy of the GPL and Google once sent thousands of AdWords flyers with seeds embedded in the paper

Why thousands? They’d attempted to figure out the address for a bunch of small websites and their search had concluded that they were all run by the FSF.

They were not. They were all Joomla websites with the GPL linked in the footer. I always thought that would be my strangest tale but no..

Someone once sent me a 10-12 page fax with printed pages of gnu.org with handwritten translations on it. A few days later they faxed me asking if I had received the pages and wanting to know when they were going to be on the website.

I tracked down their email address, and put them in touch with the translator for their language. Again via email.

Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be easier.

Does anyone else remember the email to fax relay of tpc.int? Used that more than once in the mid-90s at my first job which had a heavy fax culture as most of our clients were not yet using the internet. One of my first jobs was getting the office onto a single Internet connection (and provider) and then getting a reseller account for our ISP setup so we could offer dial up and IMAP email to our customers.

replies(3): >>43536672 #>>43537494 #>>43538144 #
1. bluedino ◴[] No.43538144[source]

> Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be easier.

Screenshots, printed out, and then faxed, with a question or remark hand-written on the page, I'd have to go check my office mailbox for issues submitted by 2-3 users. And this was only 10-15 years ago.

You know could paste the screenshot into an email...nevermind. We took orders via fax at that time so I guess it made sense?