Yesterday Alan pointed us (Whopping big collection of tips for developing workflows) to a collection of tips on developing workflows, hosted by MIT, on a mailing list called ‘SAP-WUG’.

I guessed that ‘SAP-WUG’ is a descendant of the venerable ‘SAP-R3-L’ mailing list hosted by MIT, and I was immediately whisked back years to when that was formed, and beyond.

Before SAP-R3-L there were two mailing lists; ‘sapr3-list’ run by Bryan Thorp in Canada, and ‘merlin’ run by me, in the UK. We both formed our lists in the first half of 1995, and for a while didn’t know about each other (or each other’s list). Running a list ate a lot of resources, both in computing terms and in human terms – I remember I was hacking on SAP at an oil company up in Aberdeen at the time, and after a day’s work would return to my hotel room and spend a couple of hours in ‘list maintenance’ mode each night. It was pretty time consuming.

Eventually MIT approached us both and gave us the opportunity to merge the two lists, and have the new list, which would be called SAP-R3-L, hosted and run by MIT. We still would have administrivia tasks, which we’d share and delegate, but it was a great offer (thanks MIT) and SAP-R3-L has left a great legacy.

Anyway, this year marks the tenth anniversary of sapr3-list, merlin, and SAP-R3-L.

The nearest thing I could find to commemorate was this bottle of bubbly, handed out to people in Walldorf (I was working there at the time) at a party in the car park.

So, happy anniversary, SAP mailing lists one and all!

Originally published on SAP Community