Alpine-L was the next generation of the snail mail round robins. For the younger generations, round robins thrived in the time before the internet and world wide web. They were the way enthusiasts (in this case, alpine enthusiasts) communicated across distances with others and exchanged information so everyone would be included.

Then came the the world wide web and email, and the list serve was born. This is like a Yahoo group, except it had little or no presence on the web, and was solely an email based community. Much like on the forums here, people could ask questions of the group, answer questions, submit their experiences, trade seed or plants, etc. But it was private within the designated group. It was innovative and popular in its day, but now it is time to move on.

Since its inception in 1995, Alpine-L had accumulated a large picture gallery, and its discussions are archived, although not really searchable. And although the ListServ itself is no more, these are still available for anyone to peruse. One could spend days or weeks "rummaging" through the fine photos and unique discussions, if you have the time. Photo copyrights belong to the original photographers, and require their permission to be copied, reposted or put into any database. Please to have respect, and enjoy them as they were meant to be.

Alpendex (the picture gallery)
http://botu07.bio.uu.nl/Temper...

Alpine-L archived message links (As you might expect, the list's heyday was its earlier years.)
https://www.mail-archive.com/a...

edited to correct the second link, as per the correction below.

And progress marches on !

It is too bad there is not an easy way to save information from earlier technology. It would be nice to continue searching some of the old stuff !

Hello Rick, nice to meet up with you again over here on NGA, it's me (AntMan01, aka The Onion Man)

You opening post reads like a fine Eulogy for an old friend past, Alpine-L. It certainly did serve it's purpose in its hey day. I'm responding here, as Alpine-L List-Owner for the past 7 years, to supply a working link to the text archives, the one you posted is to an old location prior to Eric Gouda moving it to a different server location, so the link does not work.

http://www.mail-archive.com/al...

I had a second link to archives in my Alpine-L signature block, I liked it better because it gave instant access to full archives, in the link above, I believe it was to a backup archive and that backup-to-archive would only happen occasionally. So in this link the archive stops after March 2017, not that much was posted the remainder of 2017, just the regular monthly announcement posts by two users. So the final truncated archive missed the few posts in December regarding the closing of the list. It appears that when the Alpine-L Listserv was physically turned off, so too were the live pre-archives.