Randy and I met on smoke-free, a list started by Natalie Maynor at Mississippi State around 1992 to help herself quit smoking. By 1996, she was tired of running the list and asked that somebody take it over. Ro volunteered, moved the list to a provider in New York and changed its name to nosmoke. Linda M ran it for a while after that and then Michele took became the list mom. You can find the list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nosmoke/ or email them at nosmoke@yahoogroups.

People came to smoke-free for help and information on how to quit a bad habit. The traffic on smoke-free was very heavy and this provided an intense support system. Many found that social bonds were formed that went beyond the quit process, into the staying quit phase.

That's about when Randy set up xfs. It started during the summer of 1995 to fill in for when smoke-free's server went down. We all needed the list so bad to stay quit in those early days. It soon became a place to hang out and talk about life, a social space in its own right. xfs started out on a server in Vancouver called coopnet.org. When we moved to Israel, Randy administered it long distance until the coop folded in June 1996. After that, it ran out of a server at the Ramat-Negev Freenet for a year, and then it moved with us to New York, at http://lrw.net.

Today, Randy and I no longer run this list tho it continues on its own. We have grown our separate ways and the love and support of the people on xfs continues to live on in our hearts.

Social networks make many things possible. Be careful what you put on your wish list because it just might come true... :-)

some smokefree resources

--lucia
Updated: September 2002