Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
My first memories of the internet were setting up an email address
at my friend’s house when I was 11 and later joining aol messaging. 


When I was in junior high or early high school teachers made it very
clear that Wikipedia was not to be used as a source on papers. I
joined Facebook when it became available to high schoolers. By the
time I graduated highschool YouTube was off and running.  

Though I spent a lot of time with computers as a kid, I didn’t know
much about the internet early on.  All I knew was that certain boys
in my class could talk to each other amongst the school computer
network during lab time, and that they generally knew more about how
to dig around online. Sometimes a friend would tell you about a
random funny or amusing webpage to look into.

I still have a postcard from Utah sent by someone on an email chain.
Those used to be very common when I was a kid.

I joined the well a couple years ago to detoxify my brain from
social media addiction and slog. It might be working, though I do
fill a lot of the time that I would be inclined to be on social
media (cuz most people my age and younger are on social media) here
on the well.  Which makes me a little bit of an outlier I guess.
  

    
Yow. Paydirt! When was the last time you included your snail mail
address in your signature?

Also, the first Fido/USENET crosspost being an "ad" reminded me of
another book recommendation. _Spam: A Shadow History of the
Internet_ by Finn Brunton is a fascinating book looking at how the
problem of unwanted communication shapes networks and communities
over time. <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spam>
  

    
Hanna's post raises a question: my recollection was that the
BBSverse was mostly male energy. How many sysops were women?
  

    
The only one I remember is Stacy Horn, who founded "Echo" (do I have
that right?) in NYC. That was a more well-like system than the
average BBS.
  

    
I was thinking about <stacy> when I posted <178>... and she was the
only example I could think of.
  

    
in <179>: speaking of Echo, in NYC:

> That was a more well-like system than the
> average BBS.

True, as I recall. And raises some related question: 

   How often in the early BBS days was the 'sysop function' actually
   performed by a single individual?
   
Thinking that 'sysop' of a given system encompasses:

   1. Legal ownership: of both physical and intellectual property;
      general administration.
   2. Hardware related tasks: dev and admin
   3. Software related tasks: dev and admin
   4. Community related tasks: dev and admin (?)
         -- and 'community' quickly extended beyond the single BBS
   5. Business related tasks: dev and admin (?)
      (does this subsume 1. above?)
         -- for example, a multi-line BBS transitioning into 
            being an early ISP

When multiple individuals were involved, perhaps only one would 
tend to be seen as "the sysom" to the outside world. Other individuals 
with vital roles might not be so visible (as is the case still today).
  

    
It would depend in part on scale - a relatively small BBS with a few
users is easily managed by one person. But a larger system like the
WELL, with a wealth of robust conversations, needs more - we have a
couple of hosts for each of our conferences, and we have a
management team. And we have somebody who understands and manages
the technology.
  

    
If it wasn't clear already, add my thanks for the book and this topic here.
Hving been active here, on Usenet, FidoNet (I still remember one of the
earliest inter regional conferences there being a politics conference shared
between San Francisco and Plano Texas. What a tinderbox that was :-).

I appreciate the lessons I learned which I took with me when I started some
professional networks for sientists and educators which are still active.
  

    
(Hoover just slipped in)

re <182>:
Makes sense. But I'm realizing that there's also a kind of informality
that can occur at the individual end of the scale. How many sysops
actually bought their BBS hardware using 'pooled' resources? Like with
friends who shared an interest in having a BBS, but cost is more than
any one is willing to shoulder. And how many such situations are
documented so we could discover them today.

The first computer I 'owned' was in partnership. $5K for a used
PDP-11/05 in the early 70's -- the partner had already scrounged an
ASR-33 w/ paper-tape reader/punch. So we were in 'business' -- but also
young enough that our agreements were not formalized for several years.
(They sat in the 'shared-memory' part of each of our heads.)

If this sort of informality happened with any frequency with BBSs, then
there might be lots of credit for making things happen that's been lost.
Another way the picture is distorted by time.
  

    
Small sample set, but I think almost all of the BBSes I used in the late 80s
in Houston were run by a single person.  Area code 713 was physically
very large.  All of Houston, most of the suburbs, even NASA JSC, a 45
min drive away from Houston (the City of).

In my next post I'll hide a list of Houston BBSes posted to tx.general
on 23 Aug, 1988.
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Wow, reading that, I forgot how many FIDO-like networks we had in
Houston.
  

    
In that epoch, I belonged to Echo, which ran Caucus, a Pico inspired
(but worse) commercial conference package.  I also belonged to the
Utne Reader community service which ran as I recall <bryan>'s Motet
system.  
  

    
While covering a bit later period (1993 onwards) this animation of
top web sites is quite amazing: 
https://mobile.twitter.com/vitaliyk/status/1546818443826999296
  

    
Great to watch the ebb and flow -- but also to consider all the 
background events that were driving those numbers. Oh, and then thinking
about the measurement issues -- what exactly is being measured here?

Google dominates in the end (today), but how many of today's google
competitors do what google did and collect all their services under
the umbrella of a single domain name?  (Or *nearly* all, since Youtube
is shown distinct.)

It would be great to see something similar for the various categories
we've been discussing in this inkwell topic: 

   1. Growth in the number of BBSs.
   2. Growth in various measures of BBS traffic: logins, user-time,
      posting volumes, inter-node telephone traffic (calls, duration,
      total bytes transferred).
   3. ARPANET traffic measures
   4. USNET traffic
   5. Timesharing usage and traffic.
   6. Business data transmission traffic via: the telepnone networks,
      commercial business networks (packet-switched vs not).
   7. Emergence and growth of the Internet itself: traffic and usage
      -- especially different types of traffic: recall when file-sharing 
      seemed to accounted for a majority of the Internet usage? The 
      growth of streaming networks. Chat vs email vs video conferencing.
   8. Datacenter traffic as "The Cloud" became real and evolved: the 
      transition from 'on-premises' to various degrees of 'hybrid-
      cloud.' 
   9. The rise of content delivery networks and "edge computing."
  10. Sensor networks and AI.

And through the decades, how much of all this was in service of human-
to-human contact? And how much of what's invisible to us today is also
still aiming to satisfy that same longing?
  

    
We're scheduled to formally end this discussion on Tuesday, but
Kevin is a member of the WELL, and I'm pretty sure he'll be around
to continue. So we can continue indefinitely. I do want to thank
Kevin and Yale University Press, Tom Jennings, Tim Pozar, and
everyone who agreed to read the book and join the conversation. 
  

    
This is a wonderful discussion.  I'm trying to think of how I can
explain this to my 20-year-old interaction design students.
  

    
<jet> I would love to chat more about opening up this history for
your students. At UVA, I teach a media studies elective called
"Comparative Histories of the Internet" that follows in the spirit
of the discussion here. I'm happy to share the latest syllabus, if
it would be helpful. I'm especially interested in hands-on
activities like taking a "field trip" into a MUD, running a Minitel
emulator, and building geocities-style homepages. I imagine some of
these projects could be adapted to interaction design with a little
tweaking.
  

    
Wonderful!  My work email address is jet circle-a functionalprototype.com.

I'm Adjunct so my cmu.edu account comes and goes "like the wind,
baby".

Most of what I teach is physical computing/interaction but every year
I suggest some new electives.  I wonder if I could dumb-down an IRC
server and make it feel like 300 baud.

Minitel!  I just remembered that I was on the Minitel-for-the-US beta
team in Houston.  It was so, so strange. I can't remember if I had an
Amiga or the 3b1 at the time, but it was worse than using the VT-100
clone the uni let me take home.  People who had computers and modems
had a much better experience than Minitel users.  People who didn't?
"What's the point of this tiny TV with a keyboard that doesn't do
anything""
  

    
No kidding! As an avowed minitel-o-phile, I'm fascinated by the
various US videotex experiments. A few years ago, Julien Mailland
wrote an excellent paper about France Telecom's effort to build a
Minitel-like platform in the Bay Area.

- Julien Mailland. "101 Online: History of the American Minitel
Network and Lessons from Its Failure." IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, 2015.
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641921>

And thanks in part to Julien's curiosity, we can now watch this
video of a rave in Oakland circa 1992 with people are tapping away
on Minitel terminals while hardcore techno blasts in the background:

- "Le Minitel en test dans une rave party en 1992",
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1r_a-V0uEQ>

For more background on the rave (including awesomely trippy
flyers!), see:
<https://mixmastermassey.typepad.com/mixmaster-massey/2010/04/the-woopy-ball-ma
rch-6th-7th-and-8th-1992.html>

Without spoiling the surprise, I'll just say that there may be some
familiar faces from around the WELL... ;-)
  

    
As we approach the official end of this discussion, I want to shout
out other books that dig into the origins of the net. Here are a few
of my recent faves to kick it off: 

Megan Sapnar Ankerson. Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social,
Commercial Web.  2018.
<https://nyupress.org/9781479892907/dot-com-design/>

Shaohua Guo. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative
Visibility in the Digital Public. 2020.
<https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32857>

Charlton D. McIlwain. Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice,
from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. 2019.
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/black-software-9780190863845>

Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll. Minitel: Welcome to the
Internet. 2017. <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minitel>

Eden Medina. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in
Allende’s Chile. 2011.
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries>

Benjamin Peters. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of
the Soviet Internet. 2016.
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-not-network-nation>

Joy Lisi Rankin. A People’s History of Computing in the United
States. 2018.
<https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674970977>

(And as <jonl> suggested, I'll be around! Happy to keep the
conversation going.)
  

    

Didn't <tex> work for Minitel?
  

    
Yeah. I even had one of those for a while.  Never proved itself useful.
  

    
I had one in the late 80s in Houston, must have been a different
failed attempt.

Dial back to, say, the 1970s and make this how you get to the phone
book and deal with government offices and it would have been genius.
  

    

great conversation. thanks, jon & kevin & everyone!