GrassHopper Digest -- Monthly Periodical?

[Mark P. Line]

On Mon, 11 Oct 1993, Simon Cox wrote:

> Nice idea Mark, but I don't think the printed page is the right medium.
> I already archive bits of the list, to a series of files with headings
> not dissimilar to the ones you propose, and then rely on my flakey memory and
> "grep" to retrieve stuff.  A better database would be the right way to go.

That was my first thought, too. But then I decided that hardcopy would be
better, because (a) there must be *many* more GRASS users than are on the
GrassHopper lists, and (b) I saw no feasible way of motivating a group of
people to volunteer their time in order to develop and maintain a
presumably freely accessible database. Given your comment, though, I see
no reason why we would have to stick to print media only -- we could
publish a database with monthly updates on magnetic media. 

Searching a well-maintained text database wouldn't be the problem -- we
all have some flavor of Unix, and there are some great tools that are
freely available (Hyperbole, a hypertext author/reader system under
Emacs,  thrusts itself unbidden into my consciousness, for instance).

The problem would be the same as with the printed magazine, i.e. creating
the digest articles each month, but that could be handled as I suggested
for the magazine. It would take some additional preliminary finaigling to
set up the master database and to find a retrieval platform available to
all (in terms of hardware & OS variant).