TELECOM Digest started publication August 24, 1981. Its first messages
were taken from a telephone discussion in HUMAN NETS, an e-zine at that
time on Arpanet. 

It originally appeared in Usenet as the newsgroup 'fa.telecom' meaning
it was ported to the Internet from Arpanet. Usenet newsgroups in those
days were in one of two categories: 'net.xxxxx' was an Internet group
and 'fa.xxxxx' was a newsgroup from Arpanet. After the reorganization
of newsgroups about 1985, fa.telecom became comp.dcom.telecom as part
of Usenet. Most 'fa' named groups retained the same suffix-name but
used it as 'xxxxxx.same-name' in Usenet following the re-organization.

The first eleven issues, covering August 24, 1981 through early September
of that year have been isolated from the vol1.most-issues file for
persons interested in examining the first month of publication. Also
included as part of volume 1 are an announcement on how messages were
to be forwarded through the gateway between Arpanet and Usenet, and
a test message to the original members of the mailing list on August 21
to detirmine if mailing procedures were operating correctly.

Many -- but not all -- of issues 1 through 11 also appear in the
vol1.most-issues file.

PAT
June 13, 1999