How The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
How The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/heres-how-the-post-covered-the-grand-social-experiment-of-the-internet-in-1988/
8 comments
I think we may want to stick "Mail service" between 1 and 2.
The ability to distribute printed matter by mail lead to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post being able to create a national identity in the United States.
The ability to distribute printed matter by mail lead to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post being able to create a national identity in the United States.
We are not that far technologically from being one collective sentient being, if we were all wired to the Internet using one of those chip implants. By then, think up a question and you will know it, spot a robbery and others will see it. If our society accepts the moral implications of assisted thinking, it can easily become the next mass media.
http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2013/07/21/google-wants-to-i...
http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2013/07/21/google-wants-to-i...
I wonder if one might describe coinage as the 0th mass medium - I seem to recall that for some people it was the most reliable way to determine that there was a new monarch.
What is the difference between Internet and Mobile? The only way in which mobile platforms work as mass media is through the Internet.
I think we are fast approaching a time when it makes less and less sense to draw boxes around different types of mass media.
Can I say that quality of discourse has been degrading and general utility of the net has been suffering? the article brings back memories of archie, usenet and local irc chat rooms.
There isn't anymore a general sinkhole for various activities on the net. Technologies suffered, like usenet from spam wars... yet it is good to have a set of open protocols that would provide foundation for how people use the net, so that it is not fragmented across different levels of technologies. Web had done most of the damage, not sure how to fix that.
Any comment? I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear. If there is an underlying protocol to save and distribute semantic data across the web and we could agree on that, that I think would be awesome. I heard of open data, but I doubt that can replace RFC based protocols of yester yore. IMO.
my 2d.
Any comment? I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear. If there is an underlying protocol to save and distribute semantic data across the web and we could agree on that, that I think would be awesome. I heard of open data, but I doubt that can replace RFC based protocols of yester yore. IMO.
my 2d.
> I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear.
Aye, so would I. USENET was clunky and difficult to use compared to, say, reddit, but overall I think it was far more open, in a technological sense.
Barring karma & co. (which grown-ups probably don't care about too much), I'd say the rate of innovation in online communication between 1993 and 2013 is a joke compared to the one between 1973 and 1993. And I honestly a combination of blame lazy programmers and greedy wannabe-businessmen for for this.
Aye, so would I. USENET was clunky and difficult to use compared to, say, reddit, but overall I think it was far more open, in a technological sense.
Barring karma & co. (which grown-ups probably don't care about too much), I'd say the rate of innovation in online communication between 1993 and 2013 is a joke compared to the one between 1973 and 1993. And I honestly a combination of blame lazy programmers and greedy wannabe-businessmen for for this.
I see where you're coming from, and you're right, in a sense.
What we have is something like 10x more good stuff, and 1000x more rubbish. Whether this should be described as degradation depends on what your idea of quality is... There are more and better gems to be found, but we've to sift through a lot more crap to get to them.
I think the most I'm comfortable saying is that the nature of discourse is different, and the AVERAGE quality is lower, but if we adjust our own behavior, we can reap the benefits and suffer less of the consequences.
Re: Hierarchical database, I'm totally with you. I've constantly been frustrated at how it feels like the best writing is never effectively, meaningfully aggregated.
What we have is something like 10x more good stuff, and 1000x more rubbish. Whether this should be described as degradation depends on what your idea of quality is... There are more and better gems to be found, but we've to sift through a lot more crap to get to them.
I think the most I'm comfortable saying is that the nature of discourse is different, and the AVERAGE quality is lower, but if we adjust our own behavior, we can reap the benefits and suffer less of the consequences.
Re: Hierarchical database, I'm totally with you. I've constantly been frustrated at how it feels like the best writing is never effectively, meaningfully aggregated.
The best part was definitely the last couple paragraphs. No commercial advertisement. We've strayed a little since then :-).
Look at the comments. The same Paul heckbert from 1988 showed up.
"And yeah, I remember that fill code. I always felt guilty because it contained a goto statement. I don't think I've written a "goto" since."
Loved this!
Glad I'm not the only one :-) My last goto statement was in 1984, rejected by Code Review.
I haven't written a goto since. And I haven't cared much for Code Review since, either.
Loved this!
Glad I'm not the only one :-) My last goto statement was in 1984, rejected by Code Review.
I haven't written a goto since. And I haven't cared much for Code Review since, either.
Gotos aren't that infrequent in C and C++ written without exceptions or longjmps, and stack-based cleanup needs to occur.
Last time I wrote a goto in a language that did have exceptions was the alignment portion of an unrolled loop implementation of a hash algorithm. Delphi doesn't support C-style switch statements where one case flows into the next; so the alignment switch did jumps into the unrolled loop body.
Last time I wrote a goto in a language that did have exceptions was the alignment portion of an unrolled loop implementation of a hash algorithm. Delphi doesn't support C-style switch statements where one case flows into the next; so the alignment switch did jumps into the unrolled loop body.
Yep. Gotos can be the cleanest way of handling certain errors in C.
"By the way, if you don’t like goto statements, don’t read this. (And don’t read any other programs that simulate multistate systems.)" Knuth, on the Adventure game [1]
Knuth's "Structured programming with go to statements" [2] is always a good read.
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103....
EDIT: formatting
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103....
EDIT: formatting
>The idea for pre-increment (++x) and post-increment (x++) operators in C came from PDP-11 assembler language.
He's wrong.
>Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few `auto-increment' memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own. Indeed, the auto-increment cells were not used directly in implementation of the operators, and a stronger motivation for the innovation was probably his observation that the translation of ++x was smaller than that of x=x+1.
Source: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
He's wrong.
>Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few `auto-increment' memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own. Indeed, the auto-increment cells were not used directly in implementation of the operators, and a stronger motivation for the innovation was probably his observation that the translation of ++x was smaller than that of x=x+1.
Source: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
This abstract is perfect:
True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection. They may append a :-) if they are making a joke (turn your head to the left) or use :-( for an ersatz frown.
True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection. They may append a :-) if they are making a joke (turn your head to the left) or use :-( for an ersatz frown.
I've enjoyed witnessing the use of terms like "lol" and the intentional elimination of full-stops, etc to communicate tone through mobile communications. I don't think many people throughout history have had the opportunity to witness such wide-scale shifts in language use within the course of 10, 20 years.
This article is really amazing and amusing to me, and not just because of the excitement back then over something like how "news groups produce about 4 million characters of new material a day, the equivalent of about five average books." The author, Barton Gellman, is also the reporter who is covering and breaking stories on the Snowden/NSA beat for the WaPo, including what I think is one of the most remarkable technical stories about it so far ("Fuck these guys" -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...). It's funny to me because I've heard Gellman and his partner describe him as not being very tech savvy at all...So even if his current NSA pieces don't go into the finer technical detail, it's still impressive that in 1988, he was able to grok enough of the Internet back then to capture some of its best and most profoundly gamechanging aspects of the Internet...in ways that journalists even today still don't quite appreciate:
> Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll, the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson's computer....
There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars.
"It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at Lehigh University's computer center.
> Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll, the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson's computer....
There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars.
"It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at Lehigh University's computer center.
"heaven help the user who tries to broadcast an advertisement"
The title should read "How one newspaper wrote about the Internet in 1988" because clearly, is article is an exception to the goofiness that routinely played in newspapers and TV from the 80 through the mid-90s.
And some mod finally updated the title.
I watched this TedX Talk from Tomi Ahonen and I think he may be right in his 'mass media' perspective.
1st mass media: Print (500 years old) including books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards etc
2nd mass media: Recordings (from 1890s) such as music records, videogames, videotapes and DVDs etc
3rd mass media: Cinema (from 1910s)
4th mass media: Radio (from 1920s)
5th mass media: Television (from 1950s)
6th mass media: Internet (from 1991)
7th mass media: Mobile (from 1998)
8th mass media: ?
He makes the argument that augmented reality will be the next mass media and I think he is right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU