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Dave Hughes' Campaign To Connect 6 Billion Brains
polarfleece writes "The Asociated Press has a fine story about Dave Hughes, one of my personal heros. For those of you who may never have heard of him, he is THE pioneer in the use of wireless networking for mass connectivity. His main website is at wireless.oldcolo.com." An anonymous reader also point to the profile of Hughes accompanying the article.
He brought packet radio to the most remote places, Indian Reservations, etc.
Or is that Johnny Internet-seed?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but technical skills, and artistic skills are almost always mutually exclusive.
It... is a problem. That's part of the reason why technical documentation is so (relatively) rare.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Found more info that was quite interesting, pissed me off.
Hughes is lobbying for the FCC to increase the power to at least 5 watts, which would expand the service area to 50 to 70 miles. That would make a big difference in rural areas, he noted. The FCC staff originally recommended that the transmissions be allowed at up to 100 watts at any frequency above 75 mhz. The spread-spectrum technology allows practically unlimited transmissions without interference, Hughes said, but the objections of companies such as Motorola and Bell South helped to stunt those potentially visionary rules.
One does have to wonder though if connecting previously sheltered cultures, like Sherpas who rarely leave their home area, or small tribes in South America, will encourage them to join the rest of the world.
According to my sociology-minor roommate when I was at university, that's literally what happens to small sheltered cultures. However, because they don't have any pricy exports, they end up changing from a functional non-technical culture into one that expends most of its efforts trying to get its hands on the trinkets they see Westerners with. The result is that their society is basically converted into a theme park for people with more money than them.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The reporter is apparently too young to remember that before the Internet was available to the public, there were things called "billboards".
Billboards could be networked in the sense that you could send email or transfer files between them, but it was more like store and forward networking rather than a fully connected net like we have today.
They mention that Colonel Hughes subscribed to The Source. That was a commercial billboard that was around before CompuServe. I guess it went out of business because CompuServe became more popular.
I considered subscribing to the source when I bought an ASCII terminal and 1200 baud modem in 1983, but decided not to because it was exhorbitantly expensive, being charged by the minute of connection time. I couldn't afford that on my college student budget.
The Source was really a big timesharing computer that lots of people logged into, not really a network at all.
I'm pretty sure it took more than ten years for the Internet to have more than a hundred hosts.
Colonel Hughes might have been able to access it if he was still in the military at the time, but it wasn't widely available even to the military.
To illustrate how unavailable the Internet was back then - I got the money to buy that ASCII terminal by working as a summer research assistant for an astronomer at CalTech.
The astronomy department was considering gettings its two VAXen connected to the ARPANet (it wasn't called the Internet yet). I don't mean "two main computers", I mean "two computers" - everyone used vt100 terminal to compute, and took turns at the extraordinarily expensive Grinnel image processing workstations, which had a 512 by 512 resolution and were the size of a refrigerator, mostly consisting of RAM.
Anyway, a couple machine at Tech were already connected to the ARPANet, I believe just the Physics and Computer Science UNIX VAXen.
After quite some heated debate within the department, it was decided that the expense of getting connected to the ARPANet just wasn't worth it. They felt it was a better use of the department's money to invest in research, instrumentation and traditional computing resources.
For example, they bought a third VAX, an 11/750, that was smaller than the two 11/780's we had. It came with a newfangled GUI workstation (that I could never figure out how to use) that was also the subject of much debate, and set the department back $150,000.
It could routinely support a couple dozen simultaneous terminal users. But I don't think it had the computing power of a 33 Mhz 80386 PC.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
This guy was also written up in Boardwatch - a magazine that started out covering the world of BBSing and tried to expand into Internet issues throughout the 90s.
One thing from the old articles was a mention of something he had gotten installed at a local bar. They had a few booths, and one of them had a RJ-11 jack so he could plug in and dial out with his laptop.
The bar is gone now, but he undoubtedly solves the problem with wireless technology instead.