ArXiv at 20

摘要

Twenty years ago this month, I launched an electronic bulletin board intended to serve a few hundred friends and colleagues working in a subfield of theoretical high-energy physics. I had recently moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and for the first time had my own computer on my desk, and the desire to simplify the exchange of unpublished manuscripts (preprints) between researchers, previously distributed as paper copies by post. This automated repository and alert system for physics preprints, at hep-th@xxx; lanl.gov, was implemented shortly before the dawn of the web era. As I e-mailed to a colleague at CERN more than a year later: 'I know nothing of WWW, what is it?' The original plan was for roughly 100 full-text article submissions every year, each stored for three months until the existing paper distribution system could catch up. By popular demand, nothing was ever deleted.