The fire of Web 2.0 has finally burned out. The Web 2.0 consultants have risen from the ashes born again as Social Media Experts. A question I heard recently: “What’s the difference between a Social Media Expert and a large pizza?” The answer? “A large pizza can feed a family of four.”
In the sixties my input was first via card decks, and later via TTY terminals hooked up to the mainframe over phone lines using acoustic couplers. 300 baud, man.
In the seventies not much changed for me. I was sort of distanced from “big-iron” computing machinery. It was a decade that began with IBM word processing typewriters and then, while the mid-peninsula folk were wiring up their first personal computers, I was suffering a brief obsession with programmable hand-held calculators… Hewlett Packard 67 versus Texas Instruments 95, elegant versus affordable.
My information technology neighborhoods and niches in the eighties were data networking, IBM Systems Network Architecture, and document creation… from IBM’s GML to Wang’s VS word processing computers. Ethernet emerged into the public consciousness early in the eighties and put paid to ARCNET and IBM’s token ring architecture. The clusters of dumb terminals tied by a coaxial umbilical cord to a cluster controller and sharing the processing power of the IBM mainframe were replaced by PCs. The Macintosh emerged as an elegant little stand-alone device. The competition then between Microsoft operating systems and Apple was no different than it is now. The Mac’s were elegant. The PCs were affordable. Novell was the proprietary standard Network Operating System. Modem manufacturers like Racal Vadic, Racal Milgo, and Gandalf rose and fell. All traffic was textual and the speed varied from very slow to slow.
It was the time of USENET and Gopher, an emerging public use of the Internet. It was also the time of the rise of the great roach traps, the mass market online Network Service Providers—CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie casting long shadows over the small ISPs, the online Bulletin Board Services, and communities of interest such as the Well. Much more could be said about these private and public networks and services, but not here, not now.
Came the nineties and the rise of the world wide web. Browsers ruled. 56kbps modems weren’t fast enough. A lot of ISPs with money sunk in modem racks were going out of business by 1995. I was crafting crude brochure-ware web sites and hooking up web access to online banking and payment systems by day and web surfing by night. The number of AOL diskettes and CDs arriving in my mailbox quadrupled. Even today I have friends with @aol.com email addresses so I know the company didn’t go out of business. In the competition for sticky eyeballs, AOL may have been the winner. Who knows?
Came the naughts and the echoes of the old Cat Stevens song…
out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a cluetrain
Oh cluetrain take this country,
come take me home again
For the people came empowerment. For business came a time of instability and radical change. Markets became boogie. Personal web publishing and media creation took off. The google pretty much made the Yellow Pages irrelevant, and Craig Newmark single-handedly sank newspaper classified advertising with his list.
Well, so much for the reminiscence. Today we are locked into our networks, neighborhoods, and niches. We twitter, we hang out on facebook, share photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube. We mark our passage with “lifestreaming” software. We catch every bookmark from del.icio.us, every status update on the facebook, blog entries, our tumblr stuff our stumbleupons and our diggs, and we extrude them through FriendFeed so no nuance of our interactive online life will be lost. The flavor of the month afficionados call these the tools of social media. The more cynical call them digital crack.
A lot of people have spiraled around the drain and been flushed out onto a beach in Second Life. Time moves differently there, but maybe that’s a ramble for a different day and a different blog post.
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Ah Nostalgia!
It makes the world go round for old folk like us.
I was thinking of those old times just the other day.
In the late 70’s I went to work for a packet switching data network company. We had an early message switch on an old Honeywell computer. Every Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, techies and operations folk came to work with their pillows and blankets so we could catch catnaps under our desks between the inevitable
multiple system crashes from the heavy florafax flower orders on the message switch.
By the early 80’s we got these great “silent 700’s”. They were little light weight portable (30 cps) terminals (still with heat sensitive printer paper) that were easy to take on the road. The kids sat on the living room floor playing “Caves” on the terminal, it took reems of paper to get anywhere in the game.
Our developers had constructed the network interfaces so we could do local packet acknowledgements and fool the terminals and the hosts into thinking there was no real propagation delay in the network. This was no small feat as the network expanded to Europe and Asia. 56 KB trunk lines were ‘new technology’ to ATT, and
the best long line connectivity we could get was 9.6 kbps, error correction protocols were serious business on those noisy lines. Still, the network traffic grew rapidly, we hosted the “Source”, the “Well”, car dealerships and freight companies began using electronic inventory control through the net. Timesharing applications on our PDP10 hosts were accessible from anywhere on the network. We offered early relational database applications with which we (or our customers) could quickly construct business apps, and used PUBS on the PDP10s for document creation.
I think around 1980 a little group (Augment) was purchased from SRI (Stanford Reasearch Institute). They had their cubbys next to mine. I remember them showing me the workgroup messaging, shared calendars, meeting software and prototype mice. Doug Engelbart was part of that group. Over at PARC (Xerox’s research center) others were creating pieces of the technologies that eventually found
their actualization in Apple pcs.
It was quite cool when HP came out with a reasonably priced desktop terminal with a CRT in addition to instead of paper.
The Network part of the company (which had, in the 70’s, been considered simply a vehicle to get customers to the time share business) became the tail that wagged the dog. Network interfaces propagated, to support 3270’s, X.25, X.75 gateways, various IBM and Digital hosts, Internet IMPs,we sold private and virtual networks.
We charged $20,000 for the 2 MEG Disk Drives needed on private nets. Can you imagine! $20K for 2 Megabytes of storage!
The arrival of Visicalc and the IBM PC made stark the writing on the wall for many timesharing services, as applications moved from the hosts to the desktop.
Isn’t it funny how nowadays, apps are moving right back into the networks and the hosts - all, I suppose, in order to meet the right price point for the wireless “personal digital assistant- telephone-camera-terminal- tv-calendar-walkman-gameboy-anythingelseyou mightdesire” thing they call a “cell fone”.
My goodness. Who’d a thunk.
Thanks for the recollections Betty Jo. Somebody oughta write a book!
Thanks for the reminiscing, Frank.
And thanks for the LC … in my opinion, the fellow almost always offers an useful lyric or train of thought.
Betty Jo … (way back) in the day, when you had your cubicle next to Augment, did you by any chance get to know a guy named Jim Bair ?
re: Jim Bair. Knew the name but not the guy.