Bob Short (1:105/38) wrote to Lawrence Garvin at 15:33 on 18 Sep 2002:

 BS> How this? :

 BS> FidoNet is an amateur electronic mail system.  As such, all of its
 BS> partici- pants and operators are unpaid volunteers.  From it's
 BS> begining in 1984 as a few friends exchanging messages, FidoNet has
 BS> grown into a global network with thousands of nodes.

 BS> No changable dates, no "flag waving"...  ;-)

 BS> This is the last area we'll address for this proposal... let's not
 BS> haggle over it too much, eh?

As a grammatical point, that is "its beginning" not "it's
beginning".  The possessive does not apply here.

And I still prefer something like "global messaging network" to
mentioning the numbers.  I fully agree with Frank Vest on this point.

Take care,

Steven Horn (steven_a_horn{at}yahoo.ca)
Moderator, ALASKA_CHAT 
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+