History: September 2004 Archive Page

When we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that'swhat it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci'svisions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time when the pace of technological change rapidly accelerated and people began dreaming about the future in new ways.

--Transportation Futuristics (Berkeley)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

I have never posted before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly. This is in response to the questions about the dates of the birth of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. --Dennis G. Jerz, 1993. --Clueless Usenet Newbie: ''Re: Jesus' Birthday'' (alt.folklore.urban)

What a dork I was.

I was... am part of the Eternal September -- the wave of newbies that logged on in 1993 and ruined Usenet for good.

Usenet is a large collection of electronic newsgroups, which originated in 1979. Since newsgroups predate the World Wide Web, it's perhaps misleading to say that a newsgroup is kind of like a threaded discussion forum -- but that comparison will do for starters.

According to the Usenet News HowTo (which apparently predates the convention for naming such documents FAQs), "The Usenet is a huge worldwide collection of discussion groups. Each discussion group has a name, e.g. comp.os.linux.announce, and a collection of messages. These messages, usually called articles, are posted by readers like you and me who have access to Usenet servers, and are then stored on the Usenet servers."

Usenet messages look very much like e-mail, but the author of an e-mail has to know the address of an individual person in order to send it to that person. If you subscribe to an e-mail list, the articles are "pushed" into your in box on somebody else's schedule. They might be compiled and sent daily or weekly, but they still land in your in-box with all the mail that has been sent to you alone.

The author of a Usenet article sends it to a group (my favorite is rec.arts.int-fiction, though I mostly lurk there these days). Anyone who wants to see what has been posted lately to rec.arts.int-fiction fires up a newsreader, and points it at that address.

If you've used a discussion forum or a blog, the actions I describe may seem trivial. If your e-mail reader lets you use multiple folders and complex filing and archiving techniques in present-day e-mail readers, it may seem positively boring. But as in the dark days before Google, finding and archiving online information was difficult.

Vannevar Bush, writing in the 1940s, noted that only a generation or two earlier, the average scientist could find and read all the important publications in a particular field. As the amount of knowledge produced increased, however, it became more and more difficult to keep up. Even if you did have the time to read all the relevant words that were written, the stuff that you wanted to read was harder and harder to find, because you had to wade through ever-mounting stacks of stuff that you didn't want to read. (His solution, the Memex, was ahead of its time.)

Usenet was significant because its users organized themselves (with some help from a mysterious non-existent cabal) into hundreds and thousands of hierarchical channels (e.g. "rec" for "recreation," "arts" for "the opposite of science" and "int-fiction" for "interactive fiction"), and made at least somewhat serious efforts to confine their conversations to the assigned subject areas.

Unlike a message board, the newsgroup servers would archive only a certain number of messages at a time. If you wanted to keep a message, you had to save a copy of it locally.

E-mail readers were very primitive back when they were used mostly by geeks who didn't need no steenkin' icons or menus. Newsgroup postings were plain text -- no icons, no graphics, no navigation buttons. This wasn't some odd retro choice -- it was the command-line interface. You typed something to the computer, and it typed back to you. That was how computer interfaces worked (and it was a great improvement over paper tape and punch cards).

So what about the Endless September? At the beginning of every academic year, as a new crop of college students started playing around with their network accounts, Usenet old-timers complained that the communities they had nurtured and maintained according to the rules of netiquette were invaded by clueless newbies who (like me) trampled the flowerbeds, tracked mud into the front parlor, didn't clear our plates when we were finished eating, laughed at all the wrong times, and didn't laugh at the right times. We didn't know when to post a smiley, when to attribute a quotation, and when to STFU.

I cringe when I read what I wrote back then. Why did I post this to a newsgroup devoted to urban folklore? I certainly never expected it to be searchable and clickable years later (after a website called DejaNews published nearly decades of Usenet archives, and Google later bought them out).

Jorn Barger, the legendary netizen who coined the word "weblog," once told me there ought to be a separate netnews ghetto for "you guys" (e.g. academics).

Note that if you click on these links, you will see the messages in your browser window, neatly laid out with an interface that groups and nests threads, and offers complex search capability. That's really nothing like the technological context in which Usenet articles were originally created (on a line-editor -- a word processor that edits only one line of text at a time) and read (mostly in a linear fashion).

Depending on your news reader's settings and the activity level of the newsgroup, posts often disappeared from view after a few days. Unless you archived each message as it came into your reader, or someone volunteered to post archives online, older messages were often irretrievable. As a result, authors were expected to excerpt and cite the relevant passages in posts to which they responded.

While only a handful of students regularly read my blog, I'm sure that my own blogging style influences the blogging of my students. This is true of any teacher in any subject, however. I like to see a good debate in class, but when I see students using their blogs to go at each other's throats, my blood pressure rises.

A few students who have been blogging on their own personal sites for years have noted that they are having a bit of difficulty adjusting to the more formal tone and subject matter that bloggers at SHU tend to adopt. John Spurlock's students are blogging about sex, and Mike Arnzen blogs such topics as "Famine Fiction's Fecal Fixation", and student Kate Cielinski recently renamed her blog "Zombie Hotties and Vampire Vixens." While the subject matter is hardly parochial, the tone is appropriately academic. One doesn't see much casual use of the f-word on the academic blogs, for instance, though it may be common in the online diary a student has kept for years on some other personal site.

While I'll probably never feel comfortable with "f---", I don't mind "sucks" or "lousy" -- two words that used to conjure up shocking images, but which are now innocuous and nostalgic, respectively.

There are certain conventions of online text that I'll probably never give up (such as, "Avoid writing 'Click here!'"), and others that I won't miss at all when they fade away.

While the basic principles of Usenet netiquette remain useful, changing technology has made some of the specifics pretty much irrelevant (e.g. don't use a .sig file longer than your post; carefully edit your replies in order to preserve the chain of nested indented quotations; avoid top-posting). It's always interesting to me to watch my students testing out strategies to drive traffic to their blogs, or giving each other hints on how to make the most of their blogs. I'm trying to resist the urge to save them from all the bumps in the road they are likely to encounter.

It's September, and I'm unleashing another crop of bloggers on the world. But some have been blogging already for years, and have developed a culture all their own. They're going to trample a few of my flowers and track a little dirt on my carpet, but that's okay, because I don't live in a museum.

Last night, in an e-mail discussion list for teacher-bloggers, one member lamented that one of her students was using his blog to trash her and her methods -- in part because she has asked him to apply certain standards of academic decorum to his academic blog. Those standards rankled him, because it meant that he was being asked to change the writing style he had developed in his personal journal.

The discussion that ensued reminded me that a little more than ten years ago, I was a clueless newbie, fumbling my way towards basic internet literacy. It seems like I blinked, and suddenly I'm working with a group of online teachers on establishing standards -- however informal and nebulous -- and debating where to draw the line.

I have never done this before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly.

Update, 16 Sep: Frank Carver describes his own experience with Usenet before newbies like me arrived.

On April 12 1979, Kevin McKenzie of Arpanet's MsgGroup made the following suggestion:


Perhaps we could extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e.: If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:

"Of course you know I agree with all the current administration's policies -)."

The '-)' indicates tongue-in-cheek.


At that time, the initial response was less than enthusiastic and the idea sank into oblivion.

Two years later, Scott Fahlman, a professor from the University of Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) sent this message:


19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman

From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(


From the Fahlman message, the phenomenon expanded at great speed. First, it propagated to other universities and research laboratories, then worldwide. A few months later, tens of variants began to appear in messages, becoming more and more elaborate.


However, not everybody agreed that Scott or McKenzie were the true inventors of this system. Some chronologies assure that PLATO educational system users began using smiley characters probably as early as 1972.


The main problem was that the original messages in which the smiley was invented had been lost... until September 2002. After a significant effort to locate it, the original post made by Fahlman on the CMU CS general Bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 Vax backup tape. To our knowledge, the McKenzie message has never been retrieved. --FIRST SMILEYS (APRIL 1979)  (old-computers.com)

The full archives of the MSGGROUP discussion used to be available at www.tcm.org, but that link is now defunct. Much of the site (I don't know how much) is still archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20020209153802/www.tcm.org/msggroup/.

At any rate, I pulled McKenzie's original post and the first response, and did a preliminary search for the text string "-)" that came up negative. I used this subject for a class years ago.


>http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/clippings/smiley/emoticon.txt

McKenzie says "This idea is not mine, but stolen from a Reader's Digest article I read long ago on a completly different subject." While McKenzie himself seems to have vanished into the ether, I did at one point head to the library where I looked at microfilm copies of several years of Reader's Digest articles. I found one interesting article about the messages a family leaves on a refrigerator, but I couldn't imagine how McKenzie could get "-)" from that.

In his book Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov describes, with some amusement, journalist Alden Whitman sending him questions in April 1969. According to Nabokov, of the dozen or so questions, only three of N's answers made it into the New York Times article. He suspects that the unpublished answers will appear as a future "Special to the New York Times." (Here's a link to what seems to be a transcript of the article.)

When asked, "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?", Nabokov writes,

I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of a concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. (133-4)

I am fairly sure that Reader's Digest exerpted Nabokov's book... if I weren't up to my neck in unrelated work, I'd try to dig up that reference.

(Other sources have noted Nabokov's "supine round bracket," but I don't think I have seen anyone make the connection between McKenzie and Nabokov. So I really should turn up the citation.)

McKenzie's contribution is often overlooked now because, well, it was overlooked when he originally made it... but since his suggestion was for "tongue in cheek," not a "smiley," it's probably inaccurate to use MacKenzie's post to indicate "the first smiley". I think "-)" for "tongue in cheek" probably failed because it's a literal depiction of a metaphor. The symbol represents a metaphor, which represents an ironic, detached mode of speaking. The ":-)" figure is an icon that represents something far more immediate and informative. As much as I hate to quote the lyrics to "It's a Small World After All," it's probably true that 'A smile means friendship to everyone," while I wouldn't expect speakers of other languages to understand what "tongue in cheek" is supposed to mean.

Student Impressions of Internet History Milestones (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This morning I gave my students a randomized list of key events in the history of the internet, and asked them to estimate the year when each event happened. "Average" gives the average of all student guesses. "Actual" gives the actual date. "Diff" gives the difference.

	Event	Average	Actual	Diff
	IBM founded	1980.6	1911	69.6
	first computer with a disk drive	1983.7	1956	27.7
	first computer sold with a keyboard and monitor	1984.8	1960	24.8
	mouse (pointing device)	1988.0	1963	25.0
	word "hypertext" coined	1988.0	1965	23.0
	internet created	1986.6	1969	17.6
	working computer hypertext system demonstrated	1989.0	1968	21.0
	first e-mail message sent	1987.0	1971	16.0
	Apple Computer Co. founded	1982.1	1976	6.1
	first commercial computer game	1984.6	1978	6.6
	CD (compact disc)	1986.4	1981	5.4
	Microsoft Windows	1987.9	1983	4.9
	HyperCard (hypertext system for home computers)	1991.0	1983	8.0
	World Wide Web created	1990.8	1990	0.8
	first graphical web browser created	1990.0	1993	-3.0

Some of these details are fairly obscure -- at least, for the vast majority of people on the planet who don't get their jollies researching the history of technology. So I'm generally pleased with what I saw.

The collective intelligence of the class was able to sort these events roughly in chronological order, which suggests they have a certain familiarity with the medium of the internet. But it looks like they underestimated by about half the amount of time that has passed since these milestones. They got more accurate with more recent events.

The average answer for the date of the creation of the World Wide Web is correct, but graphical browsers are actually a few years older than the average figure guessed by the students.

Historical Awareness of the Internet (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Most college students today would probably say that they feel very comfortable using the internet. Some really and truly are expert users, with a deep understanding of the function and history of the internet. But I find that when they first arrive at college, most students bring with them an experience that is shaped (and in many ways limited) by the social and entertainment uses of the internet. While I would say about a quarter of my "Writing for the Internet" students had used weblogs before , several students who had kept LiveJournal accounts didn't consider that an experience with online authoring or weblogging.

According to web design expert Jakob Nielsen, "The idea that children are masters of technology and can defeat any computer-related difficulty is a myth." Nielsen's research involved sitting and watching as children from age 6 to 12 struggled to use various web pages. My own teaching experience is with college students, but I can see that most leave high school with only the most basic sense of how to use the internet in their research.

I teach a new crop of college freshmen each year. They are trained to use Google to find "the answer" online; they often aren't terribly critical of what Google decides to put at the top of the list. Every year I have to tap-dance, plead, and cajole in order to get them to see the difference between the article in a peer-reviewed academic journal that is only accessible through a library database and an easily Google-able resource such as this "History of a Victorian Era Robot."

But most recognize that college is supposed to push them outside their "comfort zone" and into the world beyond. Many are amazed that after a fifteen-minute demonstration, they are online authors. (See Vanessa Kolberg's, "Look at Me, I Have a Blog!") I love seeing this kind of enthusiasm, and I hope I can sustain it after the newness of online publishing wears off.

At my previous university, I taught "Writing Electronic Text" as a 300-level course. The class began with theory, then moved to web design, and also included a researched essay. That class was my one shot at teaching HTML, hypertext theory, and alternative forms of e-text such as interactive fiction -- so I loaded quite a lot into it. (I'm bracing myself for what Will, a survivor of that class, is going to say about this blog entry!)

In my present position, "Writing for the Internet" is about half freshmen, most of whom won't be taught how to write a college research paper until next term. They are generally very comfortable with computers and writing (though not always equally), but it's an entry level class. The "New Media Journalism" class includes two 300-level media courses (one is "Media Aesthetics" and the other is "Media and Culture") as well as a senior projects course, so there will be plenty of time for advanced research papers and in-depth projects.

My "Writing for the Internet" students generally have less college-level experience than the students to whom I used to teach "Writing Electronic Text," but that's OK. Since most are recent high-school graduates, they are used to writing assignments that value personal expression. Since one kind of weblog is an online diary, I can introduce weblogs right away. Students can begin writing in an informal, personal voice. As they begin to develop an academic voice, I can ask them to adjust their online writing style. But more important, they can begin to feel the rhythms of webtext right away. After they've done online writing for a while, I will gradually introduce the theory. I hope they will nod and say, "Yes, I noticed that on my own, and here's somebody who's laid out categories and terminology to help me understand it!"

So far, so good.

When I first started teaching full-time in 1998, I asked all my students very early in the term what they remembered about the first time they used a word processor. After four or five years, I stopped asking that question, because almost all the answers were, "I don't remember."

The internet changes so rapidly (just a few weeks ago, I would have capitalized "internet") that the cyberculture that gave birth to online file-sharing, blogs, the WWW, and even the genesis of the internet itself is as hazy and mythologically distant to most of my students as the history of the transistor radio and the cathode ray tube was to me when I was in college.

If I have time in class today, I plan to ask my students to estimate the dates of various key events in the development of cyberspace and hypertext-- birth of the internet, the first e-mail, etc. I'll publish the results as soon as I've compiled them.

We don't have cable TV at home, so I don't watch much TV. My mother-in-law occasionally tapes educational shows from PBS, and sends them up to us. In 2000, when my son was 2, she filled a whole tape with "Between the Lions" (about a family of lions that lives in a library... get it? Between the lions?). While this is supposed to be public television, every show began and end with a classic soft-sell advertisement for eToys. A banjo strumming, a maternal voice humming and "oohing" a soothing tune, and ad copy that tries to connect a show about reading to a website that sells toys. We watched those tapes over and over again, usually pausing it in the middle of the eToys theme music. Sometimes if Peter's attention had wandered, the sound of the eToys theme music caused him to come running from the next room, crying because he didn't want me to shut off the tape.

One day, I mentioned offhand that eToys had gone under.

My wife was shocked... the ads were such a constant presence in our house, and the content of the ads somehow suggested that eToys had been around when you were a kid, and will be there when you are a grandparent.

eToys was a dot-com.

   The memos were written using a proportional typeface, where letters take up variable space according to their size, rather than fixed-pitch typeface used on typewriters, where each letter is allotted the same space. Proportional typefaces are available only on computers or on very high-end typewriters that were unlikely to be used by the National Guard.
   The memos include superscript, i.e. the "th" in "187th" appears above the line in a smaller font. Superscript was not available on typewriters.
   The memos included "curly" apostrophes rather than straight apostrophes found on typewriters.
   The font used in the memos is Times Roman, which was in use for printing but not in typewriters. The Haas Atlas -- the bible of fonts -- does not list Times Roman as an available font for typewriters.
   The vertical spacing used in the memos, measured at 13 points, was not available in typewriters, and only became possible with the advent of computers.

--False Documentation? Questions Arise About Authenticity of Newly Found Memos on Bush's Guard Service (ABC News)

When I mentioned the memos to my wife the other day, she noted that the White House spokesperson seemed unusually calm when fielding reporter's questions about this latest scandal. Since I don't watch much TV news, I wouldn't have been able to pick up on that detail.

Regarding the efforts to compile the data I listed above... wouldn't that be a cool job? Using my finely honed paper-grading skills to determine the political fate of a nation!

"It is a curious thing," remarked Holmes, "that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the 'e,' and a slight defect in the tail of the 'r.' There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious."

"A Case of Identity," Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle.

For math and science geeks it was a badge of honor, nestled neatly into a plastic pocket protector along with a handful of stubby pencils.

And then, one dark day in 1972, with the advent of the pocket calculator, the slide rule went the way of the abacus. Why fiddle around with the arcane log scales and indexes required to use a slide rule when an inexpensive calculator required nothing more of its owner than the ability to push a few buttons? --Michelle Delio
--Slide Rule Still Rules  (Wired)

The exhibit features "celebrity slide rules," such as one donated by astronaut Neil Armstrong.

In the mid-70s, I had a metric-to-English conversion slide ruler that I loved. I wonder if I still have it... I remember after watching the first Star Wars movie, I used it as a light sabre (extending the middle portion while making a dramatic "schloommmvvvvvvv" noise)... until I nicked it in battle with one of my siblings, and it wouldn't slide so easily anymore.

The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break.

Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around. --Mark Neisse --Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (AP|MyWay)

Television started as a powerful community-building force. If you had a TV set, you would watch what was broadcast, discuss it among the family at home, and also with the wider context of friends, relatives, neighbours and colleagues. If you encountered someone else with a TV set, the immediate assumption would be that that you had seen all or most of the same programmes, and could thus discuss the resulting issues from a base of shared understanding. Television was a "literate" activity in a similar way to books, newspapers and radio from earlier generations, and in the same way that usenet, the world wide web, and blogging would later become. --Frank Carver --Computer Writing and Permanence (Frank Carver's Weblog)

My mother kept scrapbooks when we were little kids. At one point, my older brother was fascinated by numbers, so my mother would clip out the one-page TV listing from the local paper, and paste it into the scrapbook. ABC, CBS, and NBC would be on the left, then the two independent Washington CD channels, 5 and 20. There were two dials on the old TV sets -- in order to get to the VHF stations (with channel numbers above 19 or so), you had to set the main dial to "VHF" and then turn another dial. There was a weak PBS (public broadcasting station), probably from Baltimore, on channel 22, and then "our" PBS station on 26.

I remember one evening, as a youngster in the 70s, out of curiosity clicking all the way round the VHF dial. Click, click, click, click. There was something on channel 45 -- another independent TV station. Like Channel 20, channel 45 had Star Trek reruns!

When my siblings and I watched the channel 45 version of Star Trek episode that we already knew backwards and forwards, sometimes -- oh, joy of joys -- we would catch a minute or two of Star Trek that we had never seen before. The scene in Trouble with Tribbles when Uhura and Chekov go shopping on Space Station K-7. An extra bit of character development in The Cloud Minders. The opening sequence of Shore Leave, when McCoy actually sees the white rabbit that he tells Kirk about just after the opening credits.

We figured out that "our" independent station had been cutting about two minutes of Star Trek to make room for commercials -- mostly self-promotions. The "other" independent station had been doing the same thing, but they cut out a different two minutes.

In retrospect, I think cutting the white rabbit from "Shore Leave" was probably a good idea -- Kirk thinks McCoy is pulling his leg. That not only helps define Kirk's friendship with Bones, it also underscores Spock's assessment of Kirk as not performing at top capacity because he is overworked (and in need of shore leave).

I am amazed at how much television is out there. I don't think of it as "my" medium anymore. My kids go to bed late (around 10pm), and since we don't get cable, if the TV does happen to be on, I'm always conscious of the language and the content one is likely to see on the few stations we do get. When Peter was two, he used to love watching Wheel of Fortune. When I came home from work, I would send my tired wife off to her regal retreat (the bathroom), and put on the Wheel while I made dinner. One night, just as the show as ending at 7pm, the very first thing that appeared after the closing credits was a network promotion for a late-night soap... one woman scowled at the other and shouted, "Goddamn you, you bitch!" and slapped her.

At that moment, my fatherly genes kicked in, and I stopped thinking of TV as a harmless entertainment. We own a lot of videotapes now -- either provided by relatives with cable and/or better television reception (a whole tape of Zaboomafoo, another of Sesame Street, another of Teletubbies, etc.), or picked up on sales.

It really is something to be able to pop in "The Wizard of Oz" or "Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang" whenver my kids want it. When I was a kid, the networks would show these shows once a year on a "movie of the week" special. Most Disney movies would be chopped up to fit into two episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney. <voice style="Grumpy Old Man">That's the way it was, and we liked it!</voice>. The next day, everyone at school would be talking about it.

Broadcasting gets less broad with every new channel. I don't think this is a bad thing. I've seen recent studies that suggest that people who spend lots of time online take that time away from the television, not away from reading books.

Thousands of irreplaceable books were feared lost or damaged in a fire at one of Germany's most precious libraries, though some 6,000 historical works - including a 1534 Martin Luther Bible - were saved by a chain of people who spirited them away from the flames, officials said Friday. --Jochen Weisigel --Rare Books Feared Lost in German Fire (AP|MyWay)