Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? We Did That 40 Years Ago
wired.com
wired.com
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".
* 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."
Which was a gigantic mess, for many reasons. Check out www.cs.ucla.edu/~lixia/papers/NAT-in-Retrospect.pdf [PDF].
"...which work most of the time."
Exactly.
But that has nothing to do with the focus on the web to the exclusion of all else that is possible.
As someone said, TCP/IP became a standard, even though there were superior alternatives.
The benefits to us that you observe are in the adoption of a common standard, not in the choice of the protocol.
Client-server is standard. NAT is standard. Firewalls are standard. When everyone adeheres to standards, it's a good thing. But these choices are poor and do not benefit us as much as better alternatives would.
The web is but one example of client-server, albeit a large one.
It's client-server that is the most insidious problem.
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:
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.)
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...
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.