Original charter of rec.photo.equipment.35mm and notes on thecharter

On 8/18/2008 10:15 AM SMS spake thus:

Original Charter

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This group is for the discussion of all aspects of 35mm camera
equipment. This includes 35mm SLR camera bodies and lenses, 35mm
point-and-shoot cameras, 35mm rangefinder cameras, 35mm scale focus
cameras and 35mm half-frame cameras.

All postings made to this group should conform to existing Usenet
guidelines (see news.announce.newusers for guideline documents). This
group explicitly prohibits the posting of commercial advertisements or
other promotional material, whether or not it is in any way related to
photography. Binary postings (i.e. non text postings) are
prohibited.
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Notes on the Charter
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The creators of this group wisely did not include any reference to
the type of sensor, even though both film and digital sensors were in
existence at the time of the groups creation. Clearly they knew that
eventually there would be digital sensors that were the same size as
35mm film, and they did not want to exclude discussion of these products.

At this time there are not separate Usenet groups for 35mm film
based SLRs and 35mm digital based SLRs; rec.photo.equipment.35mm is a
proper venue for all posts regarding all types of 35mm cameras,
including SLR 35mm film, SLR 35mm digital, and point and shoot 35mm film
(there are no 35mm point and shoot digital cameras at this time).

Actually, not true. First of all, you're basically trying to read the
minds of those who wrote the charter retrospectively, which is a pretty
inexact science.

But more to the point, when this group was created, there were digital
SLRs that were in the same form factor as 35mm film cameras (used the
same lenses, had a sensor approximately the size of a 35mm film frame,
etc.), but as you well know, they were enormously expensive and not very
widely used. Nobody really knew which way digital photography would go
at that point. So it's quite a stretch to just breezily assume that
"they" (the charter writers) were specifically including digital cameras
under that heading. If that were the case, don't you think they would
have spelled it out? I would think so.


--
"In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I
will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the
population into concentration camps and turn the country into a
wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do
that. Let ME do it.'"

- Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson
presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost
Authority".