

Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? We Did That 40 Years Ago  - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/social-media-history/

======
pokesomesmot
So what's improved since then?

1\. Bandwidth 2\. Hardware 3\. Language ease of use

With respect to the implementations of these "services", things were actually
better back in the day. That's because users were generally more responsible
(because you had to take an interest in how the network worked in order to use
it) and there was no NAT. Peer to peer connections were the norm.

By comparison, todays "web" (which people confuse with the internet), is
crippled, functionally.

So all of these "services" use ugly hacks. Like trying to stay in touch with
people you know through some sociopathic stranger's website. As if that was
"connectivity". Or trying to run programs through a "web browser".

NAT forced people to use the web, and forget about the internet.

The future lies in moving beyond NAT, and beyond a port 80, web browser-
centric model of what people call "the internet" (which is actually just the
crippled web).

We will never get the full functionality of the internet through only "the
web".

~~~
dxbydt
NAT vs P2P is small fry. What really bothers me is the death of ATM at the
hands of IP. A protocol which had a much better design, addressing present
future and futuristic use cases dies at the hand of a protocol that had the
marketing musclepower of cisco.

~~~
mcguire
I just wanted to mention a couple of things:

* 48-byte cells.

* ATM had the marketing muscle of the entire Telco industry.

As the Wikipedia page
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode>) (which sounds
somewhat like it was written by the ATM Forum) says,

"ATM became popular with telephone companies and many computer makers in the
1990s. However, even by the end of the decade, the better price/performance of
Internet Protocol-based products was competing with ATM technology for
integrating real-time and bursty network traffic."

------
davidf18
I worked on the PLATO system beginning in high school as a 15-year old through
college. (The building where PLATO was located was diagonal south-west of my
high school). David Woolley who is created Notes mentioned in the article was
an undergraduate when he wrote Notes.

PLATO not only had social networking but was the genesis for other
technologies. The orange screen in the article was invented at PLATO and was
the genesis for the color plasma TV screen. In fact, Larry Webber, the or a
key inventor of the color plasma TV screen was a post-doc in the lab. Ray
Ozzie who took over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft
was also there. The PLATO terminals had touch screens. For software
development, when there were compilation errors, you could press a single key
and you were given an explanation of the error.

Also, the PLATO system has been resurrected. You can run a terminal emulator
from your computer and log into the PLATO system and experience and use it
much as it was used 40 years ago using a terminal emulator on this website:

<http://cyber1.org/>

Here is a list of the notes starting from 1972. An image was made from the
line printer at the time:
[http://archives.library.illinois.edu/e-records/index.php?dir...](http://archives.library.illinois.edu/e-records/index.php?dir=University%20Archives/0713010/pdfs/)

Use of the notes program mentioned in the article starts in 1974.

As undergraduates some of us would get EE degrees while working our way
through college programming computers. We were in this very fertile
environment of both software and hardware and we got an enormous amount of
autonomy.

PLATO leader Don Bitzer had enormous trust in the abilities of even high
school students to make contributions.
<http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1997/03/2614>

~~~
spudlyo
One thing that Notes did better than modern threaded comment systems or web
forums was that it had a sequencer that would allow you to quickly jump to and
read whatever new responses and/or notes that were created since the last time
you read Notes.

I never used Notes on Plato, but it was faithfully recreated on The Evergreen
State College's timeshared BASIC system running on an HP3000, and then again
to an AOS/VS based DG Eclipse MV10000 system. My best friends today are all
people I met on Notes in the 80s. In high school my pal and I spent a summer
vacation coding a Notes-like system (including sequencer) for a NewDos/80
GREENEMACHINE BBS. Good times.

I feel lucky to have spent time in the 80s learning about Plato (ok, mostly
EMPIRE) on aging dusty terminals in the back of TESC's terminal room. Glad to
see that you can still interact with it via cyber1.org. Can't wait for my
account to get created.

------
1123581321
If you would like to view the entire article in one pageview, please use this
link: [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/social-media-
hi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/social-media-
history/?pid=419&viewall=true)

------
neilk
I dislike "this new thing is just that old thing" analogies. Someone on HN
once tried to argue with me that the old unix talk utility was no different
from Twitter.

Just because it's a computerized container for human communication doesn't
mean it's the same idea. I mean, when you get down to it, it's all strings.

~~~
jspaur
Even more so it's just electrons pulsing through copper or light through
glass.

------
bobbydavid
This is fascinating. The question that immediately springs to my mind is this:
can I look at the crappy failed projects of today, pinpoint the missing
technology, and send a note to myself in the future to re-attempt building it
when that technology exists? If so, I'd be competitive with the iPad, iPhone,
etc.

~~~
georgemcbay
Yes, you can do that, sending notes into the future is trivial.

Of course, you have to get the timing just right, which is the real trick.
Being early, as they say, is virtually the same thing as being wrong.

Also, you have to hope the patent situation is improved prior to your product
introduction, because it is already neigh impossible to create a new product
that isn't _unknowingly_ violating dozens to hundreds of patents, which (given
the purpose patents are supposed to serve) is ridiculous.

------
joshstrange
Pretty unrelated to the article but does it annoy anyone else when you click a
link on HN then can't hit the back button without being redirected back to the
page you were linked to?

------
namank
_Social media is nothing new. It just has better packaging -- and better
marketing._

This is dumb. There is a time factor in the evolution and acceptance of an
idea that must always be taken into account.

And comparing today's tech to yesterday's? Metaphorically, that's ok but if
you really do believe a car is just an improved bicycle (or an ipad is a
useless laptop), you're doing yourself a huge disservice.

------
danso
The OP links to this 1975 academic paper which makes a statement pretty
relevant to today:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=958788&dl=GUIDE&co...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=958788&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE)

> _Both papers illustrate a paradox which may be seen in many "people's
> computing" groups. While attempting to bring the computer into useful daily
> interaction with a variety of citizens for a variety of applications, such
> groups often unwittingly reinforce myths about computers which, as Berk
> notes, are a primary obstacle to social acceptance of the technology as a
> tool for society_

------
hrktb
Note that imode stuff, while still alive, is a blast from the past, but
Japanese phone makers are still ahead of the curve in terms of hardware
features and hardware integrated services (specially NFC, which exists in a
really daily usable form)

------
Cthulhu_
I love how that last picture shows two people, one glass. Reminds me of
something a bit more contemporary.

------
slurry
My first experiences in serious computing were on multiuser VMS, AIX and Red
Hat systems. I really miss the camaraderie and interactive features of those
setups.

Strikes me that Web 2.0 is really about cloning that kind of functionality -
more prettily, but as yet more clumsily - for a wider audience.

(Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard just about the time they were migrating from
AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging
functionality in the process. Essentially he cloned parts of it again in a new
interface.)

~~~
hnriot
"AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging
functionality in the process."

what does that even mean? You mean using bash over ssh and checking email
using elm et al? And what's all the status and messaging functionality that
was lost?

web based email was available when Zuck was learning his ABCs...

~~~
slurry
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. That's what my college used in the late
90's/early 2000's, even though web mail had been available for a while, and I
know Harvard did too. The lost functionality was mostly finger. Some people
still used talk as well, although AIM/ICQ had mostly taken over that space.

Kids used to spend hours updating their .plan and .project files, finger'ing
other people, etc. the same way they now spend hours messing around with
Facebook and Twitter. That was lost with the move to web mail, and then social
networks stepped in to fill the void.

The differences are mainly that a) the newer tools allow for richer media, not
just text b) status updates are viewable in a timeline rather than being
destructive overwrites, but c) they still aren't as well integrated imho as
unix email/finger/talk.

------
lucian303
Yeah, you'd think people would have learned from history so they are not
doomed to ... oh fuck it, that's a pipe dream.

