A 1984 Arpanet post announced the SUMEX-AIM Mac archive

The workload

Info-Mac's own Nostalgia page reproduces the message that started the archive: a 13 February 1984 posting from Ed Pattermann, sent from SUMEX-AIM.ARPA, announcing INFO-MAC at SUMEX-AIM as a new Arpanet interest group for the Apple Macintosh. Verified, from that reproduced message's own text, because it is a contemporaneous primary document the archive's operators chose to preserve verbatim: running the list meant one mailbox per Arpanet site, funneling into a local bulletin board or distribution list at each participating institution, with archived messages kept in a file the announcement names as an INFO-MAC archive under SUMEX-AIM's own bulletin-board directory. A separate contact address, reachable through INFO-MAC-REQUEST at SUMEX-AIM, handled adding or removing sites from the distribution, meaning administration was a named, if unpaid, task from the first announcement onward.

What the documents show

Verified, from Info-Mac's own What is Info-Mac? page, revised February 2000: by that date the archive described itself as the largest, and one of the oldest, Macintosh software archives, holding over 5 gigabytes of shareware, freeware and related material, distributed through a network of mirror sites reachable by FTP, HTTP, AppleShare-over-IP, NFS, gopher, FSP or email, since the original single-host SUMEX-AIM model could not have served that later volume of traffic alone. Submissions went through a stated Submission Guidelines process rather than being posted freely, and the same page names a moderator contact for the operation. These are the Info-Mac Network's own successor-operator statements, not Stanford University's own current documentation, since Stanford's SUMEX-AIM host itself has long been retired; this entry treats the archive's own historical pages, not a Stanford library site, as the primary record.

The operating cost

Neither document names a price; Info-Mac operated as a free archive with costs, unstated in these pages, borne by SUMEX-AIM's original Stanford research funding and, later, by whatever institutions volunteered mirror bandwidth. No source here states a specific dollar figure for hosting, mirroring or moderation labor at any point in the archive's history.

The stop condition

The What is Info-Mac? page itself, last revised in February 2000, describes an active mirror network with no stated end date. A separate, later community forum bearing the Info-Mac name states plainly that it is a preserved archive and is no longer active, pointing users elsewhere for current Mac discussion, evidence that the mailing list and its later forum descendant did eventually stop, though these pages do not date that stop precisely.

• Does crediting the same year as the Macintosh as an archive's founding claim require the original 1984 message this page reproduces, or would a later recollection have been enough?
• What happens to a distribution channel's authority once its host institution retires the underlying server?
• How many current download mirrors would a one-person software project need before one Stanford host's access no longer worked?

The clearest fact here is not an inference but a quotation: a dated 1984 announcement, preserved on the archive's own site, naming SUMEX-AIM, a single mailbox-per-site distribution model, and a named administrator, before Info-Mac grew into the mirrored, multi-gigabyte archive its own 2000-era page describes.