

How The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988 - 0cool
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/heres-how-the-post-covered-the-grand-social-experiment-of-the-internet-in-1988/

======
mentos
This makes me wonder what the 'next big thing' will be after the internet.

I watched this TedX Talk from Tomi Ahonen and I think he may be right in his
'mass media' perspective.

1st mass media: Print (500 years old) including books, pamphlets, newspapers,
magazines, billboards etc

2nd mass media: Recordings (from 1890s) such as music records, videogames,
videotapes and DVDs etc

3rd mass media: Cinema (from 1910s)

4th mass media: Radio (from 1920s)

5th mass media: Television (from 1950s)

6th mass media: Internet (from 1991)

7th mass media: Mobile (from 1998)

8th mass media: ?

He makes the argument that augmented reality will be the next mass media and I
think he is right.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyfHuKZGXU)

~~~
mratzloff
Why is mobile a separate entry?

~~~
pietro
For the same reason that cars are separate from trains. They enable completely
different usages.

------
perlpimp
Can I say that quality of discourse has been degrading and general utility of
the net has been suffering? the article brings back memories of archie, usenet
and local irc chat rooms. There isn't anymore a general sinkhole for various
activities on the net. Technologies suffered, like usenet from spam wars...
yet it is good to have a set of open protocols that would provide foundation
for how people use the net, so that it is not fragmented across different
levels of technologies. Web had done most of the damage, not sure how to fix
that.

Any comment? I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to
articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable
and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear. If there is an
underlying protocol to save and distribute semantic data across the web and we
could agree on that, that I think would be awesome. I heard of open data, but
I doubt that can replace RFC based protocols of yester yore. IMO.

my 2d.

~~~
weland
> I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles
> rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a
> tendency to change over time and often disappear.

Aye, so would I. USENET was clunky and difficult to use compared to, say,
reddit, but overall I think it was far more open, in a technological sense.

Barring karma & co. (which grown-ups probably don't care about too much), I'd
say the rate of innovation in online communication between 1993 and 2013 is a
joke compared to the one between 1973 and 1993. And I honestly a combination
of blame lazy programmers and greedy wannabe-businessmen for for this.

------
element_4
The best part was definitely the last couple paragraphs. No commercial
advertisement. We've strayed a little since then :-).

------
kken
Look at the comments. The same Paul heckbert from 1988 showed up.

~~~
edw519
"And yeah, I remember that fill code. I always felt guilty because it
contained a goto statement. I don't think I've written a "goto" since."

Loved this!

Glad I'm not the only one :-) My last goto statement was in 1984, rejected by
Code Review.

I haven't written a goto since. And I haven't cared much for Code Review
since, either.

~~~
barrkel
Gotos aren't that infrequent in C and C++ written without exceptions or
longjmps, and stack-based cleanup needs to occur.

Last time I wrote a goto in a language that did have exceptions was the
alignment portion of an unrolled loop implementation of a hash algorithm.
Delphi doesn't support C-style switch statements where one case flows into the
next; so the alignment switch did jumps into the unrolled loop body.

~~~
mratzloff
Yep. Gotos can be the cleanest way of handling certain errors in C.

------
sarreph
This abstract is perfect:

 _True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the
absence of inflection. They may append a :-) if they are making a joke (turn
your head to the left) or use :-( for an ersatz frown._

~~~
visakanv
I've enjoyed witnessing the use of terms like "lol" and the intentional
elimination of full-stops, etc to communicate tone through mobile
communications. I don't think many people throughout history have had the
opportunity to witness such wide-scale shifts in language use within the
course of 10, 20 years.

------
danso
This article is really amazing and amusing to me, and not just because of the
excitement back then over something like how "news groups produce about 4
million characters of new material a day, the equivalent of about five average
books." The author, Barton Gellman, is also the reporter who is covering and
breaking stories on the Snowden/NSA beat for the WaPo, including what I think
is one of the most remarkable technical stories about it so far ("Fuck these
guys" \-- [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-
in...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-
links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-
say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html)). It's funny
to me because I've heard Gellman and his partner describe him as not being
very tech savvy at all...So even if his current NSA pieces don't go into the
finer technical detail, it's still impressive that in 1988, he was able to
grok enough of the Internet back then to capture some of its best and most
profoundly gamechanging aspects of the Internet...in ways that journalists
even today still don't quite appreciate:

> _Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley,
> needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in
> Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll,
> the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson 's
> computer._...

 _There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of
special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart
in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby
magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars._

 _" It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back
issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all
at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at
Lehigh University's computer center._

------
dwiel
"heaven help the user who tries to broadcast an advertisement"

------
officemonkey
The title should read "How one newspaper wrote about the Internet in 1988"
because clearly, is article is an exception to the goofiness that routinely
played in newspapers and TV from the 80 through the mid-90s.

~~~
officemonkey
And some mod finally updated the title.

