Quote:
Originally posted by Jesse-Joe:
Isn't it weird how many of us did think, that we were the only Gordon Lightfoot fan in the world ?
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And I still find it incredible to recall that in my internet innocence way back in 1997, on the very first occasion that I
had the internet demonstrated to me by a friend in Yeovil Somerset England, to whom I had gone to for advice on buying a new
computer, and he was keento show off his new ISDN telephone line,whatever that was, and invited me to suggest a search using, I believe, the
search engine. Feeling somewhat foolish since I KNEW for a fact that I was the only Lightfot fan in the world and certain that my friend had never heard of him, and would marvel at my insanity,I said "sure please see if there is ANYTHING on the internet about Gordon Lightfoot".I was astonished to find a selection of sites and, shortly thereafter with a new computer incorporating a strange gubbins called a "modem",
I was able to do my own searches using probably Yahoo.At that time the prime source of GL info on the internet was the pioneer site set up as a demo site for his university class by Matthew Fifer, a site long since gone but happily archived by the wonderful
Wayback Machine
One typical set of pages is at:-
Archived set from 2001
in the index on the left you will see two important links:-
1.the newsgroup
a link to a page describing alt.music.lightfoot and its then access using the usenet provider
Dejanews
which was later taken over by
http://remarq.com (the dejanews link now forwards you to google groups and I remember a BBC disc jockey in probably 1998 recommending a great new search engine with the odd name of google, who succeded dejanews and remarq as the custodian of the massive usenet/newsgroup archive.
Nowadays if you go and ogle for "Gordon Lightfoot" there are allegedly a staggering 1.2 million plus results!!
I devoured the Newsgroup,especially a fantastic series of FAQs that were updated monthly by an obviously besotted fan called Wayne Francis and in 1998/99 I found that Rik Stevens had started a chatroom on his own
GL tribute site
see his 1998 announcement at:-
http://rikchat.notlong.com/
I joined in and very rapidly found that I was by no means the only lightfoot fan around and the rest is history!!
2.FAQs.
This is a link to those FAQs which opens a page saying
"The FAQs are written and maintained by Wayne Francis." with a clickable list of sections. These were in fact the same set of FAQs found on dejanews/the newsgroup and used by permission on Matthew's site.In 1999 Wayne combined all his FAQ material and started his now well known "unofficial official" Lightfoot cornucopia at
Lightfoot! The Gordon Lightfoot Internet Companion
John