Re: significant "legal" events?

mark@stargate.stargate.com
25 Jan 93 21:50:04 EST (Mon)

> There was a time in about 1983 or 1984 where I believe Shell or Exxon
> (I remember Shell) dropped their network connection because some joke
> with racial content was posted, and some internal to the company filed
> an affirmative action complaint about it.

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

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