beginning of this century must not be forgotten! It must be over 20 years since my first (and only?) intervention in web4lib, an electronic discussion forum for library-based online managers. web4lib has been neatly archived on the Internet, but the archive only reaches back to April 1995. I therefore had to dig into my old mail folders at the ‘Cable’s Knot ’ in Helsinki, Finland, to retrieve my letter. Here it is below, headers and all (Donald J. Napoli, director of St Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana, was an American colleague with whom we competed for the ‘first ’ server-based public library):