Bob Stewart wrote:

> Each year we loose a few more of our collector friends from the hobby
> and this list.  With them goes a great deal of knowledge.  We all
> need to start writing down what we have learned from our involvement
> in the hobby.  Our generation is the one that got to talk to some of
> the people who were directly involved with the production and sales
> of the instruments.  If we don't document those conversations they
> will be lost one day.

This is exceedingly important, not only to mechanical music people
but to historians and people involved with patents.  I wonder if it
wouldn't be impossible to set up some sort of a chat session via the
Internet that works either by text or by voice, and then, at minimum,
make a quick index of the conversation to be placed in with the file
containing the voice or text.  Certainly the MMD itself does most of
this already, but I know that it's an effort for some people to write
things down.

This is only a suggestion.  The state of my knowledge of chat sessions
or voice discussions is approximately the same as my grasp of the finer
points of the reproducer.

Mark Kinsler