Date: Sunday October 12 2025
       
       The curious tale about the birth of the Los Alamos Preprint
       Archive. I always thought it was Paul Ginsparg in 1991 who started
       this preprint delivery service for the Internet. But no, it was 
       Joanne Cohn who started it all. She was a postdoc at the Institute 
       for Advanced Study in Princeton when she started an email list of
       preprint in string theory. When this service became too popular and
       not scaling in a way that the old Internet could handle, she
       contacted Paul Ginsparg. He had some ideas how the distribution
       list could be automated and the Los Alamos Preprint archive was
       created. All pre-Web and pre-Gopher.
       
 (HTM) Joanne Cohn and the email list that led to arXiv
 (HTM) Inside arXiv---the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science
       
       The bizare thing is...I could have been there and see it live. Back
       in 1999 when the Wen Hoo Lee case started in Los Alamos, I was
       there, hidden in some room in the Los Alamos Library. Noone knew,
       except the library directory and my boss, Herbert Van de Sompel,
       that I was in the city and buildings. We were creating a software
       tool that would be known as SFX. I could have met Ginsparg, but
       alas due to the secrecy of it all. Later in 2000 when he moved to
       Cornell, I was also there, in the hope of finding a job there. But,
       alas also in this case Cornell did not provide me an offer. 
       
       Life if full of chances, some are taken and some not.
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