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"The Internet is a high-capacity means of transmitting outrage from one person to another." -- austin-dern, 2008-01-11

"The Internet is a high-capacity means of transmitting outrage from one person to another." -- austin-dern, 2008-01-11

dmk replied to the LiveJournal copy of my entry last night about that agenda-tracking system that was a big deal for the folks I wrote it for but part of the background noise today. And she pointed out an even more striking example, in a very understated way. She wrote:

"Remember that e-mail system we built while at UD in the early eighties? It was a kludge, but it was a novel idea for most students to leave messages for each other on the computer."

We're having this conversation in a world and time where email is ubiquitous -- it's not just geeks who use it; it's businesses of all sizes, from the lone tradesman with a van to multinationals; it's our neighbours, parents, grandparents, teachers; between email and the World Wide Web, some governments are acting as though they expect most of their citizens to get most of their information from their governments via the Internet. Television stations solicit "man on the street" reactions by reciting their email addresses instead of sending a reporter out to a local street with a microphone and a camera. Message fly around the globe in seconds and across the state in milliseconds, and the big problem nowadays is not how to find someone to get a feed from or convince the government to put you on the research net; the problem nowadays is how to deal with too much email, a lot of it spam. Even the laptops designed to bring personal computing to the children of the poorest communities on the planet include an email client. For many of us, "developments" in email mean social ones like non-geeks starting to depend on it, improvements in features such as adding MIME to make non-text messages easier or POP and IMAP to facilitate transporting the messages to your personal computer, and extending email capabilities to smaller and smaller devices -- cell phones and PDAs. Most of us don't think about the development of email in the first place, and the hacks[1] used to make it useful for connecting people on different campuses.

So let me take you back in time a mere fraction of a human lifetime ago!

For the folks who weren't there: the university had an HP-3000 running MPE -- a time-sharing operating system -- and a 'terminal ward' for the students, with four CRT terminals and a DECwriter (printing terminal kinda like a wide-carriage, dot-matrix TeleType). If anybody had a computer in hir dorm room or at home, it was in the Apple II / TRS-80 Model I range (I can only remember one person having a computer in the dorm while I was there) and didn't talk to any other computers, and the school computer didn't talk to any other computers -- UUCP was just for UNIX then, AFAIK, and most of us, not being at one of the big tech schools, hadn't heard of UNIX yet anyhow. The university library had a card reader and keypunch set up so that when a student checked out or returned a book, an IBM punch card was generated representing that transaction, and once a day someone would walk the deck of cards over to the computer room for batch processing and walk back with the printout from the previous day's run. Being a small university -- a liberal arts college, a business school, and a seminary -- we were far, far down the ladder from the small number of sites attached to ARPAnet, BITnet, CSnet, etc., none of which we had heard of yet. We didn't even have a LAN.

Some of us had the foresight to be able to dream of someday sending email to friends at other schools (I don't think any of us quite got as far as envisioning the ubiquitous email of today), but back then, even just being able to post private messages to each other in a central location -- since most of the folks we'd want to leave messages for all that often were in the group that haunted the 'terminal ward' daily -- rather than walking to somebody else's dorm to slip a note under the door ... even that was a Really Cool Thing when dmk unveiled her program[2] and showed us how to use it. (As I recall, I helped with a refinement or two after a bunch of us had started using it, but she's the one who made it.)

Though it paled in comparison to the UNIX mail program[3] and UUCP that I got exposed to a few years later, at the time just being able to leave messages for each other on the school computer was very useful -- and a novel idea for most of us[4], since email just wasn't one of those things most people had heard of yet, even us geeklets.

[1] Yeah, I just classified UUCP as a clever hack. It's a hack that worked out extremely well, and grew a layer of polish, and more or less Made The 'Net Go Round for a good long time ...

[2] As I recall, it was written in BASIC, right?

[3] Well, not the System III or Version 7 utterly bare-bones 'mail', but the BSD enhanced version of it, aka 'Mail' or 'mailx', a version of which[5] I still use today because, a) I prefer command-line over mouse for dealing with text, and b) it's a 'clean' interface that doesn't distract me.

[4] A couple of us had thought that some form of note-leaving system would be useful, but it was dmk who looked at it as a project instead of a "wouldn't it be nice if", and for most of us even the idea was novel.

[5] Most of the time, I use 'nail', which is basically mailx plus the ability to handle MIME attachments. I had planned to write exactly that if I ever got ahold of the source code to mailx and had the time, but somebody somewhere saved me the trouble. I really do prefer that user interface for dealing with email, except for two mailing lists that it's sometimes more convenient to read in threaded mode (for which I use Mutt).

dmk replied to the LiveJournal copy of my entry last night about that agenda-tracking system that was a big deal for the folks I wrote it for but part of the background noise today. And she pointed out an even more striking example, in a very understated way. She wrote:

"Remember that e-mail system we built while at UD in the early eighties? It was a kludge, but it was a novel idea for most students to leave messages for each other on the computer."

We're having this conversation in a world and time where email is ubiquitous -- it's not just geeks who use it; it's businesses of all sizes, from the lone tradesman with a van to multinationals; it's our neighbours, parents, grandparents, teachers; between email and the World Wide Web, some governments are acting as though they expect most of their citizens to get most of their information from their governments via the Internet. Television stations solicit "man on the street" reactions by reciting their email addresses instead of sending a reporter out to a local street with a microphone and a camera. Message fly around the globe in seconds and across the state in milliseconds, and the big problem nowadays is not how to find someone to get a feed from or convince the government to put you on the research net; the problem nowadays is how to deal with too much email, a lot of it spam. Even the laptops designed to bring personal computing to the children of the poorest communities on the planet include an email client. For many of us, "developments" in email mean social ones like non-geeks starting to depend on it, improvements in features such as adding MIME to make non-text messages easier or POP and IMAP to facilitate transporting the messages to your personal computer, and extending email capabilities to smaller and smaller devices -- cell phones and PDAs. Most of us don't think about the development of email in the first place, and the hacks[1] used to make it useful for connecting people on different campuses.

So let me take you back in time a mere fraction of a human lifetime ago!

For the folks who weren't there: the university had an HP-3000 running MPE -- a time-sharing operating system -- and a 'terminal ward' for the students, with four CRT terminals and a DECwriter (printing terminal kinda like a wide-carriage, dot-matrix TeleType). If anybody had a computer in hir dorm room or at home, it was in the Apple II / TRS-80 Model I range (I can only remember one person having a computer in the dorm while I was there) and didn't talk to any other computers, and the school computer didn't talk to any other computers -- UUCP was just for UNIX then, AFAIK, and most of us, not being at one of the big tech schools, hadn't heard of UNIX yet anyhow. The university library had a card reader and keypunch set up so that when a student checked out or returned a book, an IBM punch card was generated representing that transaction, and once a day someone would walk the deck of cards over to the computer room for batch processing and walk back with the printout from the previous day's run. Being a small university -- a liberal arts college, a business school, and a seminary -- we were far, far down the ladder from the small number of sites attached to ARPAnet, BITnet, CSnet, etc., none of which we had heard of yet. We didn't even have a LAN.

Some of us had the foresight to be able to dream of someday sending email to friends at other schools (I don't think any of us quite got as far as envisioning the ubiquitous email of today), but back then, even just being able to post private messages to each other in a central location -- since most of the folks we'd want to leave messages for all that often were in the group that haunted the 'terminal ward' daily -- rather than walking to somebody else's dorm to slip a note under the door ... even that was a Really Cool Thing when dmk unveiled her program[2] and showed us how to use it. (As I recall, I helped with a refinement or two after a bunch of us had started using it, but she's the one who made it.)

Though it paled in comparison to the UNIX mail program[3] and UUCP that I got exposed to a few years later, at the time just being able to leave messages for each other on the school computer was very useful -- and a novel idea for most of us[4], since email just wasn't one of those things most people had heard of yet, even us geeklets.

[1] Yeah, I just classified UUCP as a clever hack. It's a hack that worked out extremely well, and grew a layer of polish, and more or less Made The 'Net Go Round for a good long time ...

[2] As I recall, it was written in BASIC, right?

[3] Well, not the System III or Version 7 utterly bare-bones 'mail', but the BSD enhanced version of it, aka 'Mail' or 'mailx', a version of which[5] I still use today because, a) I prefer command-line over mouse for dealing with text, and b) it's a 'clean' interface that doesn't distract me.

[4] A couple of us had thought that some form of note-leaving system would be useful, but it was dmk who looked at it as a project instead of a "wouldn't it be nice if", and for most of us even the idea was novel.

[5] Most of the time, I use 'nail', which is basically mailx plus the ability to handle MIME attachments. I had planned to write exactly that if I ever got ahold of the source code to mailx and had the time, but somebody somewhere saved me the trouble. I really do prefer that user interface for dealing with email, except for two mailing lists that it's sometimes more convenient to read in threaded mode (for which I use Mutt).

Low-fat buttermilk is just all kinds of wrong. If it tasted sort-of close to the real thing, I might be able to shrug and say, "well it's probably better for me," but it's not that close. It reminds me of the phrasing Douglas Adams used to describe the not-tea in the Hitchiker's series.

Wrong.

(Puzzled as to why what I had in my mouth didn't resemble what I was expecting, especially since I've had this brand before, I did eventually think to take a closer look at the carton, where I finally spotted the telltale phrase.)

It didn't even occur to me that I would have that option -- otherwise I might have paid more attention when I grabbed it in the grocery store. (Or maybe not, since I wasn't feeling very well when I dashed out for groceries yesterday).

At least I only bought a pint[1] of it. *whew* (Maybe it's useful for making pancakes or something??) But the craving I got it to satisfy is still not satisfied.

[1] Translation for readers living in modern countries: a bit less than half a liter.

Low-fat buttermilk is just all kinds of wrong. If it tasted sort-of close to the real thing, I might be able to shrug and say, "well it's probably better for me," but it's not that close. It reminds me of the phrasing Douglas Adams used to describe the not-tea in the Hitchiker's series.

Wrong.

(Puzzled as to why what I had in my mouth didn't resemble what I was expecting, especially since I've had this brand before, I did eventually think to take a closer look at the carton, where I finally spotted the telltale phrase.)

It didn't even occur to me that I would have that option -- otherwise I might have paid more attention when I grabbed it in the grocery store. (Or maybe not, since I wasn't feeling very well when I dashed out for groceries yesterday).

At least I only bought a pint[1] of it. *whew* (Maybe it's useful for making pancakes or something??) But the craving I got it to satisfy is still not satisfied.

[1] Translation for readers living in modern countries: a bit less than half a liter.