32 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. in 1978 Gary Turk was working for the digital Equipment Corporation he was a sales rep and his job was to sell these the deck system 20. now this thing had built-in arpanet protocol support it was like you don't have to do anything special you could plug it into a network and it would just work and rightly or wrongly Gary thought well I reckon people who are on the upper net might be interested in knowing about this computer and digital didn't have a whole lot of sales going on on the US West Coast they had a big office on the East Coast but West Coast you know California Portland those kind of places they didn't really have much of a presence so he got his assistant to go through the arpanet directory and type in the email addresses of everybody on the American West Coast who had an email address 393 of them and put them now at this point they overflowed the header field so all the people who got this email got an email which started with about 250 other people's email addresses and then right down at the end of it it says hey we invite you to come and see the deck system 2020

      Gary Turk "invented" spam in 1978

    2. one person whose Innovation is still a significant part of the way we work with it was this guy it's Ray Tomlinson and he was working on an opponent Mail system in 1971 and Rey invented at Rey is the person who went well hang on if we know the user's name and we know the arpanet host where they host their email we could put an at in the middle because it's Alice at the machine

      Ray Tomlinson invented the use of @ in 1971

  2. Nov 2023
    1. There was no automatic advertising delivery. There was no personalization, or any kind of tracking. Instead, I go through all of this every morning, picking which ads I thought looked interesting today, and manually changing and updating the pages on my site.This also meant that, because there was no tracking, the advertising companies had no idea how many times an ad was viewed, and as such, we would only get paid per click.Now, the bigger sites had started to do dynamic advertising, which allowed them to sell advertising per view, but, as an independent publisher, I was limited to only click-based advertising.However, that was actually a good thing. Because I had to pick the ads manually, I needed to be very good at understanding my audience and what they needed when they visited my site. And so there was a link between audience focus and the advertising.Also, because it was click based, it forced me as an independent publisher to optimize for results, whereas a 'per view' model often encouraged publishers to lower their value to create more ad views.

      Per-click versus per-view advertising in the 1900s internet

    1. I've highlighted the shit out of this because I believe it actually argues a fundamental truth: communicating electronically is, indeed, a better way of communicating.

      I don't think this friendship had to die, but the illusion of romance probably did. I'm going to do my best to choose to ignore the confirmation bias within me - could it be the absence of stigma that enabled these realizations? Is the stigma, itself, then, now a virtually all-powerful (beyond any measure of reflection) force which will never allow us to progress???

      Fuck hype, man.

  3. Oct 2023
  4. May 2023
    1. Incidentally, when a straightforwardly “I’m a Nazi” Nazi showed up in the beta, people used the report function, and the Bluesky team labeled the account and banned it from the Bluesky app and restricted promotion of the account of the person who invited him. This changed exactly none of the tenor of the Nazi conversation on Mastodon, but it happened.

      Now just imagine the equivalent on the scale of an entire server and you've got the story of Mastodon's incredibly centralized, swift expulsion of Gab's influence. Here's The Verge's version for the moment.

  5. Apr 2023
    1. reinventing Google Sidewiki or similar systems in which replies exist outside of the network itself.

      I'm ashamed/bewildered to confess that I have zero recollection of Google Sidewiki... Given the medium in which I'm typing this right now - and a whole bunch of other anecdotes from my online life - I think I would have been very engaged with such a thing.

      What a Wiki page though! Thank you. Bless. Through it, I discovered the Google Toolbar Help YouTube Channel.

  6. Dec 2022
    1. D. Clark. 1988. The design philosophy of the DARPA internet protocols. In Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols (SIGCOMM '88). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1145/52324.52336

      The Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, was first proposed fifteen years ago. It was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and has been used widely in military and commercial systems. While there have been papers and specifications that describe how the protocols work, it is sometimes difficult to deduce from these why the protocol is as it is. For example, the Internet protocol is based on a connectionless or datagram mode of service. The motivation for this has been greatly misunderstood. This paper attempts to capture some of the early reasoning which shaped the Internet protocols.

  7. Oct 2022
    1. Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

      reference for this quote? date?

      Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

    1. He started work at COMSAT, where he had access to funding from the Department of Defense, some of which was earmarked for the ARPANET. “It was a sandbox,” he later told an interviewer. “We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were things like develop electronic mail, and protocols.”

      Early ARPANET: Do Good Deeds

  8. Sep 2022
    1. So this is one of these things where the idea that you could make an internet is 100%, just from biology being so much more complex and working so well for decades.DEVON: And why is the decentralization of biological systems and of the internet so important for scalability?

      !- relationship : internet to biology - internet was designed to biomimic biological systems for redundancy, resiliency, decentralized

  9. Jun 2022
    1. And that identity, like most of us was white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian. That's how the Internet got personified in those early days. Again, this wasn't everyone If you gathered all of us to talk about those early days, the women, the people of color, they would tell different stories. But it was most of us.

      Early culture on the internet: "white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian"

  10. May 2022
    1. Instead of emphasizing the role of popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the Arpanet. Though fascinating, the Arpanet story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of Arpanet and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as ideas, technologies, and people flowed between them

      Interwoven history between Arpanet and BBS networks

      There is some truth to this statement. The necessary protocol underpinnings were from the Arpanet part of the pair, but the social pieces were derived from BBS interconnections via dialup protocols like UUCP. Is there an evolutionary link between UUCP and NNTP?

      In the calls for loosely linked independent social networks to replace the large, global private social networks, there are echos of loosely connected BBS networks.

  11. Apr 2022
    1. Funnily enough one of the reasons I started looking into the decentralized social media space in 2016, which ultimately led me to go on to create Mastodon, were rumours that Twitter, the platform I’d been a daily user of for years at that point, might get sold to another controversial billionaire.

      😬

  12. Nov 2021
    1. ʰᵉʳᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ᵗʰᵉ ᵈʳʸʷᵃˡˡ ʷᵉᵇˢᶤᵗᵉ ᵉᵃˢᵗᵉʳ ᵉᵍᵍˢ

      Please be warned: a friend noticed some very insensitive language I had forgotten about entirely. I've chosen to leave it since this website should not be surfaced in any discovery engines beyond NeoCities... Hoping that isn't a stupid idea.

    1. I spend most of my day in iOS Notes app.

      Did I ever really find this man intelligent??? Things sincerely do make a lot more sense now. Such a specific lack of aspiration.

    1. You.com’s big differentiating feature is that it lets people influence which sources they see. You can “upvote” and “downvote” specific categories, so when you run searches, you’ll see preferred sources first, neutral searches next, and downvoted sources last.

      THIS IS LITERALLY THE ANSWER TO SEARCH.

      Just… FYI.

      All you need to do is give users more control.

  13. Aug 2021
  14. May 2021
  15. Apr 2021
    1. Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There’s a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the nineteenth century. The big problem with our culture is that it’s being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that’s been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

      This is a great definition of pop culture and a good contrast to high-culture.

      Here's the link to the entire interview: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-3-319-90008-7%2F1.pdf

  16. Mar 2021
  17. Nov 2020
    1. They are often cited as the first website to feature banner ads.

      If, indeed, Wired invented the banner ad, it is also worth mentioning that wired.com was one of the last websites to be rendered completely unusable by them (when it was still running on the old CMS. idk about now.)

      I love @LaurenGoode and find her insight very worthwhile even in this format, but I really wish the platform on which it now resides (Wired's CMS) wasn't *completely* and *entirely* broken. Chorus should've been a package deal. https://t.co/OweeG30jR6

      — ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) July 13, 2019
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

    2. The first Wired website, therefore, has a unique distinction of being an unofficial, amateur project led by two people from a different country uploading copyrighted content they didn’t own to a site that lacked any of the panache, glitz, or unconventional charm that had made Wired famous.

      Not sure how to feel about this...

      Now that I have read the story this way, I'm wondering...

      Might one say that Wired only went online as early as it did because of their ban from Singapore?

  18. Apr 2020
    1. Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.
  19. Nov 2019
  20. Aug 2019
  21. Nov 2017
    1. collaborative effort between a university professor and a government researcher (much like the collaborations at the beginnings of the Internet)

      Brief History of the Internet has been in my required readings for Sociology of Cyberspace.

  22. Mar 2017
    1. One of the earliest nonscience scholarly uses of this technology was the listHumanist,

      Humanist claimed as one of the earliest uses of Listserv for nonscience scholarly work

  23. Jul 2016
  24. Aug 2015