I remember that! I was in the middle of it.
It was Shell, somewhere in Texas. The posting was to net.jokes,
and it was called BLKTRAN, a parody of FORTRAN with lots of jive.
It was pretty offensive to blacks.
Someone at Bell Labs in Denver (remember when Denver had a Bell Labs?)
filed an AA complaint against AT&T for carrying it on their machine,
and it landed in my lap.
Those were the days when Usenet existed on a machine because the SA
set it up, and management usually didn't know about it. When they
happened to find out, often the knee-jerk reaction was to shut it
off, although usually the SA could fast-talk his (always his, as I
recall) way out of it. At Shell, the SA didn't talk fast enough,
and the link went away, at least for awhile.
Mark
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16