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Back To the Social Media Future
theodp writes: Decades before WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook, and multiplayer Call of Duty, there was TERM-talk, P-Notes, Notesfiles, and Battlestar. Brian Dear goes back to the future, penning A 1980 Teenager's View on Social Media, as written by his 19-year-old UDEL undergrad self, an avid user of PLATO, the 55-year-old granddaddy of today's MOOCs. (His article is a response to "A teenager's view on social media," published last week by a current teenager.) Of old-school texting, Dear notes that you-are-how-you-type: "Every character is displayed in real time as each of us types. So *how* you TERM-talk with folks becomes part of your reputation. Kind of like what your handshake is like. We all know when we shake somebody's hand and they have a firm, confident grip, full of vigor and life, a quick shake and release and you know this person is with it. And then there are those with cold, clammy fish hands that feel like they have no bones, it's all just cushion all the way down. Well in TERM-talk, if you type fast, that's cool."
I can remember back to the days of paper tape and punch cards - that was "real" computing.
if you type fast, that's cool
This must be where the whole "frist psot" behavior came from.
with emoji
We all know when we shake somebody's hand and they have a firm, confident grip, full of vigor and life, a quick shake and release and you know this person is with it. And then there are those with cold, clammy fish hands that feel like they have no bones, it's all just cushion all the way down. Well in TERM-talk, if you type fast, that's cool.
Someone who gives a dominating handshake or typesreallyfastwallsoftext are more likely to be full of shit and talk before they think.
I like talking to people who spend time before they come to a conclusion. The best conversations are mostly spent in silent thought.
Being an old fart myself, I immediately recognized my wife's hand when she sent me a Morse message.
Am I cool now? Or is it my wife, I'm not sure.
Firm and confident, hand coated in shit. That's how you succeed in the world.
Live typing inhibits communication because it makes people self-conscious.
The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009/10/14/The-Lost-Lesson-Of-Instant-Typing/
But on Cyber1 I don't use Notes or Term. That got me kicked out of NovaNet a long long time ago.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... http://classic-wbs.net/ and Geocities/Freeyellow/Angelfire/Intelcities was the social media in the mid-late 90's even irc was pretty cool and met a few people off of fit. Of course new groups were the king at that time too.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
William Norris, the founder of the company behind PLATO, was ahead of his time in other ways, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner cities and disadvantaged communities."
See also:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
http://www.amazon.com/William-...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AC wrote: http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009...
"I could have told the Wave people about what I'd learned, except I didn't know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos....
Part of the problem, in both cases, is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app's gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can't be removed later on because they're so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren't actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
ICQ had the real time (every key as it was pressed) text conversation in 1997.
I remember it being popular within my group of internet friends (we all came from a chat site about rock bands). None of us had any self consciousness about it and it was one of those things that made us confident that we were living in the friggin' future.
It's so weird that the feature has been absent from every modern chat client and system since. Is it because the vast majority of people would be embarrassed by how often they're actually using spellcheck?
In my day we used talk and ntalk to chat on and between UNIX systems. You run finger on a host to find out if someone was logged in and active. finger @host.domain.com would give you the output of the "who" command.
The real old folks used UUCP and bang paths. That was way before my time.
Handshakes tell you only bad things. For people with extremely weak handshakes, either that doesn't mean anything, or if it does, then in that case you can tell that in so many other ways that the handshake doesn't tell you anything new. For people with normal handshakes, you know nothing. For people with vice grips, you know that these are either deluded fools who were told that they need to shake hands like that, or they are the people who wish ever-so-dearly that they were dictator for life, so they could crap all over everyone and not suffer any consequences like a mini Kim Jong-un. But of course, those people reveal themselves also in myriad other ways, so the handshake doesn't tell you much. The information content of a handshake is very low and it can at most tell you bad things about the other person - it's either normal or bad.
He uses the term "social media" a lot, for an unknown term 35 years ago. He name drops both bill gates and steve jobs. I call bullshit, this article was not written 35 years ago.
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He uses the term "social media" a lot, for an unknown term 35 years ago. He name drops both bill gates and steve jobs. I call bullshit, this article was not written 35 years ago.
He's not claiming that he wrote it 35 years ago.
My only real experience "Live Typing" was modem-to modem connection. When you want to send a file directly between PC's and not over a BBS.
First you'd call over the phone to arrange the connection, one of the users would agree to be the caller, the other would be the answerer. Hang up and then get ready for the call.
First user would ATDT5551234
When the second user hears the phone ring they'd ATA
You'd turn echo on so you'd see what you were typing, Live type chat a bit, and then send a file over KERMIT, or X/Y/Z modem.
Chat some more, and then end the conversation. +++ATH0
Cool; don't recall trying that back then!
BTW, on your user name (LinuxIsGarbage), I resisted using Linux for years, because I knew better things were possible (like QNX and its microkernel for internals, or any software a more systematic approach to naming commands and command options as far as command line utilities). Ultimately though, those two factors will likely lead to its replacement -- although perhaps the result will still be called "Linux", just with a very different shell and a very different kernel. :-)
I feel one reason Linus Torvalds has gotten, and needed to get, such a reputation for profanity and being an effective gatekeeper hardass for software quality is because of a fundamental weaknesses in monolithic kernel design relative to a dynamic community with a variety of ever changing needs. I've written before on that is a couple Slashdot comments, such as in a story about the last time he chewed out a kernel developer bigtime.
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I had hoped for something much better -- even perhaps something modular based on Forth or Smalltalk/Squeak! But for whatever reason Linux got the social momentum behind it, so I started using it too hoping it would improve over time (and it has). I started trying it around 2000 or so as toe dipping, and then used it as my main desktop (Debian) around 2003 or so until ditching it for OS X as a desktop around 2008 or so (getting tired of so much breakage with every upgrade, plus wanting some Mac-specific scanner OCR software). I still use Linux for servers and such, but my main web server (maintained by someone else) is a BSD variant, which I consider somewhat more secure/reliable. I'm thinking about going back to Linux given Apple's dropoff in quality with later OS upgrades (I'm still lagging a few versions, but know that can't last without patches etc..).
But as with the theme of the original article, the fact that QNX, Forth, or Smalltalk (or others, Symbolics Lisp Machine?) was there first in some key ways as far as making for good interactive experiences has apparently been mostly forgotten.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If you want to relive your youth you can try these days by first finding two computers with modems.
No need to hook them up to a phone line, just run a phone cord between the two (works every time I did it) for the poor man's null modem.
On one computer type ATD on the other type ATA.
On Linux, it is gaining great marketshare in the Smartphone realm! We passed the year of the Linux Cellphone years ago! However apparently it doesn't count because of the atrocious GNU frontend isn't used.
I want to like Linux, I really do. However I think if it were a more centralized development there may be less duplication of effort, and more effort spent moving forward. Maybe more like Free-BSD / PC-BSD, however that has it's own problems (not near the marketshare of Linux, so even less support). Other problems with Linux include WorksForME, RTFM, Hey it's free what do you expect, and YouHaveTheSourceFixItYourself when you try to get help.
UI keeps trying to reinvent itself to solve questions no-one asked, and make Metro look good. Speaking of answering unsolved questions: PulseAudio. Lets just split off and duplicate effort that's already out there!
Unstable kernel ABI/API.
Oooo! But it has wobbly windows!