The most enduring passion in my life has been pyrotechnics.
I was into it before electronics, before
photography.
It's occasionally gotten me into trouble,
not to mention the occasional close call,
but it's enhanced my life considerably.
In March 1990, I started a
pyrotechnics mailing list.
It proved popular enough that eventually the newsgroup
rec.pyrotechnics
was created, with the volume of the mailing list used as justification.
In its early years (1990-1994), I archived rec.pyrotechnics.
You can retrieve compressed tarfiles of the messages from those years
here.