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It's pouring rain outside. The sky is dark, and the rain is coming down in never-ending sheets. Through the computer's speakers, Paul Simon is reassuring me that he'll ease my mind. And it's the end of an era.

A small warning, gentle reader. This is a little odd. Bear with me.

I got two emails today that I never really expected to get. The EvangeList has been shut down. Well, the "official" version has been shut down. I fully expect the banner to be taken up by a score or more eager volunteers. But it won't be the same.

I guess some background is in order. The EvangeList was a mailing list run by a mad marketing guerilla named Guy Kawasaki. Guy was an Apple Fellow whose job was to evangelize the Macintosh platform. This was a real bitch-kitty of a job, since (remember kids, this is a flashback) in 1994-1995 Apple was having some real rotten times. Guy started up the EvangeList, to get announcements out to the crazy Macintosh users on the Internet about stuff! Product offers, facts to counter misconceptions, jokes, Apple news, everything! He wrote scads of books, Rules for Revolutionaries and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy being the big ones.

I joined the mailing list in the summer of 1996. At least, that's about when I remember joining. My earliest saved posting is from June, 1996. It was a riot. 40,000+ fervent Macintosh fans, all waiting to receive the latest news from the source in Cupertino. We were a force, and Guy knew it. A company decided to cancel it's Macintosh product because they thought Apple was going to die next week? Some cretin posing as a journalist slapped together a story about Apple's impending doom without anything passing for facts to back up their moribund assertions? Aim and fire. The Evangelist was to some people's inboxes what Slashdot is to websites that get stupid about Linux. It was incredible.

But then, something happened. Apple pulled itself out of it's terminal nosedive, and it looks like things are going to be okay. So Apple shut the list down.

There were signs of this coming, from a while ago. Guy took a long break to work on Rules for Revolutionaries and never really came back. John Halbig (Digital Guy) ran the list in his stead, but in the past month or so, postings had become really sporadic. Instead of the usual 8-9 postings that I'd get every day, I got 3 or 4 a week. And today, two letters. One from Digital Guy, saying goodbye. One from Guy, saying basically the same thing. And I was fairly stunned.

I guess I never really expected that the EvangeList would end, that it would carry on in perpetuity, always doing its schtick, and serving as a hub for people who really liked the Mac and wanted to hear neat stuff about it. I could rationalize the decision and say that all things end in time, it's good that it ended while it still had its focus, blah blah blah, but I think those are just rationalizations.

The justification for ending the EvangeList, at least what was given, was that since Apple's fortunes had been turned around, there wasn't the need to keep the EvangeList around that there once was. So, g'bye. And that's their right.

It just feels odd. And it is the end of an era. A little era, at least. It'll be interesting to see what comes next.