Step with me into the wayback machine (RE new web technologies)

[nadinbrzezinski]

Well back in the day when I first got an AOL account, AOL was the upstart. It competed against a service called Prodigy. I am almost betting a good percentage of you haven't heard of prodigy. They went the way of the dinosaur because they stuck to just using their internal prodigy discussion groups. Well, first companies and then individuals left them. Why? AOL implemented this portal to the USENET system, which covered the nascent web. Now many Prodigy users laughed about this usenet system. Usenet worked as the original message board. Some were moderated, most were not. They were text based because quite honestly my 300 baud modem, and my phone line would not be able to keep up with any graphics. Oh there were graphics, made by users, using text.

Oh and back in the good ol' days we paid per minute, not per month \ flat rates. I celebrated when those came.

Why am I asking you to step into the wayward machine? Well regarding new technologies... or new ways of doing things. you may be afraid of the new technology, like oh Tweet or for that matter, this one, blogging. You realize blogging came straight from straight up, HTML (there I go, talking computerese) web pages that people maintained? Yes the original blog was a simple html page, nothing fancy,just text, coded in word pad or text edit or any other simple word processor. You didn't need anything fancy.

These days most users do not realize all the work that goes into maintaining a place like this. My hat goes off to the mods and the coders, since I do, and all that CSS code is a bitch. (I am guessing this site has plenty of that by the way, probably some JAVA... it works, I don't have to worry about it, and my hat goes off since the database is even harder to do)

Nor do you realize that this is just a second in the evolution of the web. This website, this technology we are using right now, will have to evolve to keep up with web standards, and remain cutting edge. Yes, those web standards change so often, it is a moving train.

Back in the day those usenet groups were cutting edge. Whether you were talking US politics, or giant walking robots, doesn't matter, they were cutting edge. These days twitter is. It will be replaced by something else, I guarantee it. But all it tells me when I see posts from folks who don't get it, is you don't get it. I've been a netizen for half my life. In the early days I paid for access by the hour and used a phone line. My interest back then was something silly for many of you, giant walking robots. Then 2000 happened, and as they say it was a political awakening. In the early days I stuck to usenet. It was familiar... and oh the flamewars with the movement conservatives. I have CHOSEN to stay away from movement conservatives since I discovered DU... and KOSS and other places. But I learned, from my experience in the web... that yes, something like twitter or DU, or even a lowly usenet list.serv (there I go again using computese) can be dangerous. After all, for those who rule our lives, a means of communication that is not controlled is dangerous.

Don't fear the new technology. If you don't get it, or you don't want to use it, fine by me. Just don't put it down, trust me, when you told your friends you were a Du'er, I am betting many of you got the same reaction I got from family when I said I'm working on a post at Rec.Games.Mecha... one of those usenet groups. It's still kicking with some old hands, but not very active. It was replaced with web based forums a while ago. Hell, I "discovered" twitter for it's potential use as a news aggregator but a month ago. Now it is news,,, you just need to take every tweet with a grain of salt and look for patterns.

If you want to see what the wayback machine looks like, google usenet.... that is what the web looked like twenty years ago.

Twenty years from now, DU WILL look very different than it does today. And for the end user, you and me, it will not matter how the guts work. But its danger will be the same for powers that be. Why many of the powers that be want to regulate the web. I thought I'd mention that too.

[Beetwasher]

1. Books Are Dangerous!

I know a guy who bludgeoned his wife to death w/ Moby Dick. :hi:

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Well they are dangerous for another reason

they spread ideas... and IDEAS are dangerous.

[Beetwasher]

3. And Don't Forget Paper Cuts!

Ouchy wow wow!

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Of course not, and if you were an early press worker

all that goopy ink

[Atman]

5. Good post. But, uh...unless you mean somthing entirely different, it's the...

...WABAC Machine. As in "going way back in time." Going "wayward" in time would be rather dangerous.

"Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman!" Mr. Peabody used to say.

Speaking of going wayback!

========

"The Wayback machine originally referred to a fictional machine from an ongoing feature of the cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show used to transport the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman back in time. It is also used as the name for part of the Internet Archive's site.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_machine

.

[dysfunctional press]

6. nevermind...

the op decided to edit the post.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. No I meant to the past...

[dysfunctional press]

9. you only edited the subject line...

the text still says 'wayward'. :shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. will do in a sec

[leeroysphitz]

8. dur

[Xithras]

11. AOL? Newbie. Personally, I think these technologies are slowly ending the Internet.

;-) Real geeks used Compuserv!

By the way, I'm of the opinion that web forums still haven't matched the utility of Usenet. You want to pull DU offline? Go to their offices and flick off a server. Want to pull alt.politics.democrats offline? Good frakking luck, because doing so would require the permission of thousands of Usenet server administrators in dozens of nations around the world. That's one of the reasons that Usenet is still around and thriving in many areas...it is the ONLY online public discussion technology that is both perfectly anonymous and uncensorable.

Technologies like web forums and Twitter make discussions a bit more convenient, but they do so at the expense of anonymity and the durability of information. That's one of the things about the march of communication technologies that has always irked me. The Internet was developed to be a robust, anonymous, and persistent data network (capable of surviving nuclear holocaust, as the story goes). Every "revolution" in online communication happens at the expense of that anonymity and utility. If an Iran style rebellion happened here, and the government wanted to come down hard, sites like DU and Twitter could be shuttered within hours and the names & addresses of every user would be in their hands within minutes. And bloggers? How many voices would be silenced by a few dozen agents raiding the offices of Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Google, Wordpress, and a few other core blogging sites? Sure, there would be a bunch of independents still operating, but the main body of the blogging community could be knocked offline in under an hour. Meanwhile, alt.politics.newamericanrevolution will be humming along nicely, and its users would remain anonymous to everyone including the server administrators.

Web forums, blogs, and Twitter make online communication more transparent and user friendly, but not all change is good, and not all advancements are improvements.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. True dat and if I wanted to do that, apache serv is my friend

and I could host alt.politics.socialists too.

But it is not that they are ending the internet, they are changing the nature of the internet.

Now in a true emergency if they want to shut off those list.servs, that can still be done. Just that you'd have to turn it off... at the root.

They are an example of distributive technologies, and I am betting dear geek... that most folks have no clue what we just said.

[Spike89]

13. Sure, we could return to Fidonet, etc. but

there was a reason these incredibly robust independent networking systems were the domain of geeks. Although I reveled in many of the old BBS's and compuserve thanks to my trusty 300 baud modem and a patched together CP/M system, the fact remains that the environment was not welcoming to the population in general. Twitter, Facebook, even the Web itself are more dependent on centralization (and thus more easily censored) but they are also truly mass media.

We all moan about how cars can't be worked on by a guy with just a screwdriver and wrench any more...but there is no denying that the complexity of a modern car is progress. They get better mileage, brake better, last longer, and survive wrecks much better. Often, progress has tradeoffs, but it is still progress.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Exactly, and we have made some progress

hell when I first went on the net, I was a complete neub. You said traceroute and my eyes would go... WHAT?

These days I am more proficient, but only because I have had a need to educate myself... my first modem was a 300 baud. These days I am on a wireless and I don't have to do nuthing to configure the damn access.

But for some that is not progress I guess.

And fido net et al were designed to be that distributive since they were following Darpa's model for the web.

God... it took somebody like Gore to pass the legislation to get it to the masses, and not just academe and the military, and them geeks.

[anigbrowl]

15. It's a mixed bag

Usenet still exists, and is still in my mind superior* to websites like DU, which use a plethora of non-standard formats. Your email is still the same basic SMTP protocol that it was 20 years ago - SMTP has multiple flaws, but the point is it actually works really well.

It's important not to get the protocol mixed up with the front end that sits on top of it. Twitter, Facebook etc. owe more of their success to graphic design than any particular technical innovation. Like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi, and a bunch of other proprietary systems, they will decline in popularity (although they'll continue to exist) when the next shiny thing comes along.

Protocols are where the staying power is. They are the networking equivalent of the moveable type system. Most websites are just instances of a protocol, just as most books pale in significance compared to the printing press.

* Technically speaking