
The Internet's Old Guard - dsr12
https://reading.supply/post/432f6903-c7cd-4cb0-a894-c09155a8ca8b
======
amatecha
It's fascinating that so many of these "old guard" care about such fundamental
principles like privacy and archiving. Many people new to internet
technologies today seem to not care, or have little interest in those
subjects. "Old guard" is indeed an apt term for these pioneers of a
technology/world/layer that seems to be heavily taken for granted today.

~~~
codesushi42
Wow I guess I'm old now. But people cared about Internet privacy well into the
2000s. To the unreasonable extreme in fact, but it was still better than the
lousy Internet we have now.

Putting your personal information online was unthinkable for most until
Myspace gained popularity. Then once Facebook took hold, no one seemed to care
about online privacy anymore.

The change in this perception was drastic and precipitous. Though it was
younger folks who started it, and the older generations followed out of
ignorance.

~~~
api
The change you describe is still a little bit mystifying to me. People went
from caring about privacy and freedom to being totally fine with listening
devices in their homes owned by advertising companies in only about ten years.

I personally blame gasified social media that linked (over)sharing little
dopamine hits. We basically used a Skinner box to retrain people to like
having their privacy invaded and willingly participate.

I don't rule out the possibility that this was intentional and designed, but
it seems more likely that we just hit upon it in the great search for a
workable business model for the Internet after the dot.com crash. People
forget that until surveillance capitalism nobody knew how to make the net into
a sustainable business. Unfortunately the answer ended up being a more
dystopian retread of the ad-driven business model of the old media we were
trying to get away from.

~~~
codesushi42
> _I personally blame gasified social media that linked (over)sharing little
> dopamine hits._

Pretty much this. We turned the Internet into a videogame about self
gratification. It turns out people would rather be famous than anonymous.

~~~
windexh8er
I remember meeting some "Internet famous" people in the mid-2000s of whom I
didn't know their names IRL and how much respect I had for them conversing in
person. Now everyone seems focused more on name recognition than credibility
within anonymous groups. Your point is spot on. I feel like the Internet has
transformed much like the game of golf. Growing up there was an etiquette and
a barrier to entry. You played with people who knew the rules and you didn't
need to ever talk about the rules because you didn't want to be that person. I
felt a lot of respect for my fellow players who were skilled and the group was
tight knit. Then Tiger Woods happened and everyone was interested in golf
overnight. Did it boost the sport overall? Sure. Do I find the game less
enjoyable today because the barrier has been lowered and there are many more
who don't seem to have come up with the same appreciation and respect for the
game? Yes. Some probably think that sounds arrogant, but it seems there are
more wannabe influencers than creators in today's landscape of the Internet.
And there are many great creators out there still. But it's often hard to find
them.

~~~
philpem
I can definitely see where you're coming from. I help out running fandom
events -- actually for furries. So it's a very different demographic to
golfers but bear with me.

I've noticed the exact same pattern. Fame (or infamy in some cases) at all
costs, everyone wants to be Internet- or Fandom-famous. "Popufur" is the
pejorative term for it.

For some it's a vehicle for their "fame". They don't give a rat's ass about
the rules -- they want their ten thousand retweets, everyone knows their name
-- and they'll step on, burn out and push aside anyone to get there. The rules
are for everyone else.

The internet was our vehicle to find each other, but now unfortunately it's
become the petard by which we are hoist.

~~~
Izkata
To combine yours and GP's comments, furry fandom has had several popularity
boosts over the past ~5 years akin to the Tiger Woods thing for golf. I go to
one of the larger conventions yearly, and the general feel has changed
significantly because of it.

------
floren
> So [RMS] goes back and says lets make this crappy piece of shit operating
> system called Unix. Its name is a gag. It's a pun too. It's a joke, eunuch,
> a eunuch is.... a uh.. So he said lets go and build an open one, he made a
> system that caught on

Not even RMS would attribute the creation of Unix to himself, although I guess
maybe this confusion is one of the fruits of his tireless "GNU/Linux" nagging.

~~~
msla
Right. RMS had nothing to do with the creation of Unix. He was off in the MIT
AI Lab back then, working on ITS in a very different culture: He had a nice
PDP-10 mainframe running an OS with plenty of creature comforts [1] as opposed
to dmr and Ken bumming an outdated PDP-7 minicomputer to hack up something
which _barely_ qualifies as multi-user. (PDP-7 Unix supported two users at
most!)

[1] (The ITS concept of detaching jobs is basically similar to tmux or screen
on modern systems, in that you can create a job tree, detach it, log out, and
then log back in and reattach it and everything will continue as if nothing
happened... assuming nobody killed your jobs. ITS didn't really have a
security model.)

Even the PDP-11 was underpowered compared to the PDP-10... but the PDP-10 was
a dead-end. It was discontinued in favor of the VAX (a PDP-11 extension, hence
the name) and attempts to resurrect/continue it (Foonly, for example) came to
nothing. RMS got kicked out of his world, his colleagues got swallowed up by
the proprietary software world, and he settled on making GNU an extended and
improved Unix instead of attempting to port ITS to a workstation with a 68000
CPU and maybe a megabyte of RAM. To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a
pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his
roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs.
;)

(And he wasn't even the first to write a Lisp Emacs. Greenberg wrote one for
Multics.)

~~~
btilly
To add one more detail to this, in writing Emacs, RMS resisted the trend
towards lexical scope, and as a result Emacs got stuck with dynamic scope.

Furthermore RMS failed to create a kernel because he believed the micro-kernel
hype. But micro-kernels are hard to debug for all of the reasons that micro-
services are challenging to scale and debug today if you have failed to create
a good toolchain around them. And the result is that by the time that the GNU
Hurd was available, most were using Linux and most of the rest were using Free
BSD.

(One does wonder, however, what would have happened had RMS himself not been
crippled by tendonitis. Could he have finished in time for his kernel to be
relevant?)

~~~
fulafel
Emacs supports lexical scope too, since 5 years ago:
[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Using-
Lexical-Binding.html)

~~~
btilly
Yes, it does. Which means that for about 30 years it did not, and a lot of
Emacs software still uses dynamic scoping.

------
_rpotter
Nice quote from the piece: "The structure of the community that develops a new
technology is formative to its evolution. Innovation requires high bandwidth
information exchange between people. The design of technology is as much about
the design of organizations and processes as it is machines."

~~~
User23
This is actually a theorem called Conway’s Law.

~~~
ColanR
From wikipedia:

> organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs
> which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. —
> M. Conway

------
Zenst
The 70's and 80's had many a fun time as it had that hobbyist element and
vibe, a community and competitiveness was displayed in one doing something
better and a zile to share knowledge and creativity for free over today's
internet of put-down smack bias negativity and patent fishing.

With that, I can honestly say that this forum from my perspective of the early
days epitomises that early ethos and the keenness to share and a penchant
towards positivity. Sure even good people have bad days, but good people are
always learning.

Though the internet grew and gradually usurped the group meets and people
shared there, new friends made, the churn of time and things change, evolve.
Not always for the better, but then perspective is anchored in time, so the
older you get the more you learn about melancholy.

------
ggm
Maybe it is just me, but the ritualistic formalisms around this kind of
behaviour feel like a peculiarly american trend. It reminded me of the Henry
Ford run backwoods camps he would do, when other multi millionaires and he
played at their childhood while deciding which labor unions to suppress in
their corporate interest.

It's creepy.

~~~
arcalinea
Idk if you actually read the post, but a lot of people early to computing
didn't become multi-millionaires. Lee Felsenstein, who helped start the
Homebrew Computer Club, has a Patreon where people support his projects and
writing now. And the ones in this group who did, like Brewster Kahle, have
used their wealth to fund nonprofits like the Internet Archive.

~~~
ggm
Yea, I know. The thing is, I am probably indulging in self-criticism because I
have been in networks since 1979 and I judge my own role as fleeting and
incidental. Envy of their success in transformative change makes me hesitant
to want to engage as they do and I critique what they do in that light.

Its too easy to wind up pontificating round the fire to the young 'uns .. At
IETF we have a greybeard problem, and its sometimes hard to decide which side
of things to be, on "older is better" and "newer is better" and "older is not
newer but they are both interesting" debates.

~~~
dasil003
I suppose if you've run in these circles a long time some of what you hear
from the greybeards feels a bit tired. But as someone with just two decades in
computers (okay three if you count hobbyist teenage years), I actually think
some of those old ideas are much more interesting than what passes for
political discourse amongst techies today. I mean has RMS' ideology ever been
more relevant?

------
Jaruzel
I wish meet-ups like this existed in the UK.

It would be nice if there was at least once a year where something as good as
this happens in one of the cities.

I know there's very-small local groups scattered around the country, but those
are mostly populated by old men[1] who just want to get out of the house once
a week (well, _my_ local group definitely is...)

\---

[1] I'm almost 50, so I'm hardly 'young'.

~~~
joeberon
Honestly I feel like often in the UK we have no sense of community compared to
the americans in basically anything. I think often unless you live in London,
UK cities can feel very functional at times with people just living. Clubs and
activities are not that popular and a lot of people are just sitting at home
watching Netflix and drinking

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm surprised to hear that's your experience. I'm Greek and I live in the UK,
in a town on the South coast. When I first came here I didn't know anyone, but
I had just gone back into painting and modelling minis, so I went to the Games
Workshop er shop, and I met all the people in the local WHFB and 40K club, who
became my main gang for the next couple of years or so (when I finished
studying and started working).

So my experience has been that it's very common for people over here to form
clubs and societies for all their little nerdy, or not necessarily so nerdy,
passtimes. Which is great, really. I can't think of a better way to get to
meet people who won't fall asleep while you discuss the most minute details of
your hobbyist obsession.

Not that I have any of those, oh no :)

~~~
Jaruzel
This is true for the Warhmammer/Minis hobbyists, but I'm looking for a regular
meetup of 'Greybeards' who have grown up with computing over the past 40
years, like I have.

Not that I have anything against younglings, it's just that my experience is
very different from theirs.

------
vcavallo
From one random person (me) to another (you), I'd recommend following Jay on
twitter or wherever. She's great.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Link for the lazy:
[https://twitter.com/arcalinea/](https://twitter.com/arcalinea/)

------
interfixus
> _We 're biologically the same as we were 10,000 years ago_

Tangential, but why do people so often get away with this particular case of
sloppy thinking?

There have been _plenty_ of wars and famines and civilisational calamities and
bottlenecks and successes and migrations and radical changes in conditions
over the last 10000 years. Evolution is known to act fast in a changing
environment. There is no way "we" could have avoided significant change - and
over much shorter timespans then ten millennia at that.

~~~
hoseja
Because of rate of mutation. Maybe ratios of different genotype subpopulations
changed but there could have been only minimal changes via mutation. Where
does the idea that evolution works fast come from?

~~~
dorusr
His argument does not need beneficial mutations to work. Merely the change in
the proportion of gene expression can have profound consequences. Take the
breeding of dogs for example. This kind of selection is what he refers to when
he talks about bottlenecks, wars, and famine. Small groups with beneficial
gene selection could've easily taken over during great changes in societal
structure. The idea that evolution can go very fast is pretty well founded in
(I forget the name) the idea that you have large stretches of minimal, small
improvements, interpuncted by short disruptive events of large
improvements/readaptation to a new environment.

~~~
Izkata
Foxes are a better example. Took only 10 generations to domesticate, and the
result wasn't just demeanor - physical, dog-like changes resulted as well:
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/domesticated-foxes-
gene...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/domesticated-foxes-genetically-
fascinating-terrible-pets)

------
Causality1
>“This deck of punch cards worked all over the world except in Australia, and
what was happening was customs inspectors, when they inspected things like
light bulbs, would pull one out at random to check. They did the same thing
with the punch cards, and put them back out of order."

That is amazing.

~~~
amatecha
One thing I'm wondering -- were the punch cards numbered/identifiable, at
least? haha

~~~
m463
you could make an angled line with a sharpie down the side of the deck.

~~~
Causality1
That's a very handy trick I'll have to remember.

