Stories: The Internet
92 Responses
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I know the internet industry is typically male-dominated, and back in the day it was even more male-dominated than it is now, but it was never that male-dominated.
Yeah, what does a girl have to do to get on that list, anyway? Tell off Trevor Rogers at a public meeting? Have a website so popular that her impoverished university asks her to offshore it? Have been listed on the once-infamous Babes Of The Web? Date [name redacted]?
Pfft, I say. Pfft.
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See, that's what I love about human beings. Every experience is shared, yet resonates with each of us in a completely different way. As do phenomena. The Internet is, I believe, an ongoing phenomena, and it has affected us all in very different, and yet similar, ways. You have the nerds, bespectacled outcasts studying Comp Sci who understood the language of the WWW as being something they could get their heads around. You get people like Danielle who meet the love of their lives in the online equivalent of a very quiet, earnest fanclub held in a very cool jazz club somewhere gritty and grimy. You get people like me only interested in the human condition, not the language of the Web, nor it's technological intricacies. I haven't covered a fraction of the interests of the people who gather in this little webbed corner of the world. People I would never have met, otherwise. All interested in the phenomena for different reasons, but getting somewhat similar things out of it. Is this the new United Nations of the human race? Or is it more like those student parties we used to have in those large flats with many rooms, and a proliferation of people we had never really encountered before? Or is it just an amalgamation of all those things? And does it really matter?
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No story... just relating that I too was a member of the Costello Mailing List back in 96, and remember reading Simon Griggs comments (among others) at the time... (I may have just been a lurker, cant remember if I posted?, certainly not frequently)
It's actually that list that opened me up to an appreciation for lyrics in general.... I grew up in a Jazz household where singing (if present at all) is frequently just another part of the musical sound...
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You get people like me only interested in the human condition, not the language of the Web, nor it's technological intricacies.
That's one of the marvels, isn't it? Net historians point out that the thing has deep roots going back quite a few years, but as far as most of us are concerned it's a planetary communications infrastructure that sprang up almost overnight, and was already all there, plus or minus a few apps. My first forays with Netscape in 1997 were not qualitatively that different to what I do now, and email hasn't changed at all. So long as you had been schooled in how to use a mouse by owning or using a personal computer, you really were up and running from the start, and that made the technology so beautifully transparent you could simply enjoy it, and be creative with it.
Which is not to say that it's not also evolving and finding new ways to make you go gaga. I suppose this might be the place to make an admission and get something off my chest: I cried the first time I used Google Earth.
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Costello-l. The Elvis Costello discussion listserv.
You just can't get a nerdier starting place than that for a long-term relationship. I'm sorry. You can all try, but you will not top it. It is totally ludicrous.
Oh, lightweight city. I'll see your "we were discussing actual music, by a someone people have actually heard of" and raise you "my officemates met his advisor at a computer security workshop and he told them he wanted his student to meet a nice girl".
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First? Computer club at school, c.1975, punching out chads from Portapunch Fortran cards which would then be sent to Databank for processing. If you'd been careful with the paperclip and lucky with your syntax, you'd get a printout in about a week's time.
10 years later, bought my first Commodore (Plus/4 about 2 weeks before Commodore canned them), and then a 64. There was this disk that came with it called QuantumLink and I so desperately wanted to be part of it but it was US only :-(
By 89 I had a 'real' PC - a Sharp 4500 luggable (barely - I still get shoulder pain memories) and a 2400 modem, accessing bulletin boards like Actrix and finding stuff from this thing called the Internet (remember the Gemstone file?)
About that time I was working with Mr Nash above at the ANZ (I won a beer from him based on his prediction that NZ would be part of Australia by 1995 - ah the folly of youth!) and using the massive grunt of my work 386SX to supplement the humble sharp at home.
Then came Cosmos (thank you Mr Naylor!) and the joys of Usenet. I remember the buzz about this hypertext WWW thing at CERN, and then Andreeson's modest posting about something called Mosaic and then the world exploded.
In 96 I was working for the IRD researching electronic commerce and other stuff when they said "we need a website - you know about this internet stuff - go build it" which was how stuff happened back then. I had 10 weeks to a) work out an architecture b) audition suppliers c) learn HTML and d) build the damn thing. A very heady time - I was dreaming in HTML by the end of it.
About the same time I got on the ISOCNZ council and was part of a revolution as we took over the management of .nz from Waikato and commercialised the NZ net. We made some mistakes but I'm pretty proud of the results on the whole. I was also chair of GOVIS and managed .govt.nz for 8 or so years.
I think the day I knew the Internet had arrived in NZ was when I saw an article in the Dominion (as was) that wasn't on the infotech pages. Ah, I thought, we're mainstream now.
30 years from punchcard to omnipresence (internet on my phone?!?) - pretty incredible really.
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Can words be copyrighted?
Yes they can.
I'm pretty sure they can't. Brand names can be trademarked, though, along with the logos.
Ah yup. Trademark I should have said.
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FletcherB, another costello-ler! I thought Simon and I were the lone NZers ever on that list. (There's now a transplanted Australian who lives in ChCh, but of course he doesn't count.)
My husband-to-be was very funny and celebrity gossip-obsessed (I still dine out on the first story he ever told me, a magnificent tale of Bryan Ferry wanking on someone's leg), so I initially assumed he was gay and just wanted to be my pal. I was so misinformed about life in 1997. :)
I trust the band at the wedding were Elvis impersonators?
We had no band! But we did play Get Happy!! (the best EC album. I'll fight you all on that! Because I know you all really, really care) at some point during the reception... before the karaoke.
I think that just may be one of the sweetest things I've ever heard. See, that's what I love about the Internet as social tool. It brings people together who may not have otherwise met.
Back in the day, everyone thought we were total weirdos. :) Most of the time I don't even think about it any more, because we've been together for ten years and our meeting place is less of a story than our shared life. But every now and then I have a moment where I think 'so *that* happened. I married a guy from Channelview, Texas. How fucking weird and cool is *that* shit?'
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Briefly...
It's been a love/hate relationship.
Well, more a 'I bet that's interesting'/'why the f*** am I wasting my time on this sh*t*?' relationship.
And you know, this is something which has never happened in any other part of my life, ever.
Ahem.
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What happens when the alphabet reaches it's mathematical outer limits. Will the alphabet need to have additional caricatures. there is already a tendency to add numerals to words in order to have them accepted as unique keys, in this ever increasing equation. Is the Internet a solvable; will it come to some sort of conclusion?
Borges asked himself the very same question in 1941. I think if you replace the word library with the word Web in his famous story you'll probably get as elegant a discussion of this as you could hope for.
More recently, Darren Tofts has written an absolutely fantastic book called Memory Trade on Joyce's Finnegans Wake and hypertext and the limits of language. I think you'd be interested also in the use of Murray McKeitch's original artwork to develop the discussion.
Because this is a deeply unjust world, the book is out of print. But available in libraries and wherever good second hand books are sold.
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Here's my story--and I'm telling it because it's something I think anyone who thinks they'll ever need a surgical procedure for skin cancer should be aware of. While I understand why doctors detest the internet (every hypochondriac with a mouse can tell them how to do their job) it helped save my partner from serious disfigurement.
Last year she was diagnosed with a pinhead sized basal cell carcinoma beside her nose. She went to a reputable plastic surgeon who operated to remove it, taking also a chunk of surrounding tissue to allow for a margin of error. In more than 90% of cases that would have been it, but when the test results came back they showed he hadn’t got it all. This meant she require at least one more operation under a local anaesthetic, and if that still wasn’t clear then she’d need a third, more major operation under a general anaesthetic followed by facial reconstruction.
That was when I got on the internet—simply because I knew nothing about BCCs and wanted to know what we should expect. From a search I learned that while most BCCs grow in pea-shaped clumps and are easily removed by the ‘vertical’ method of surgery employed by my wife’s surgeon, a tiny percentage send out roots. To remove one of these sorts of BCC the vertical method inevitably destroys a huge amount of healthy tissue. More importantly, such trauma is completely unnecessary as there is a well-established method called Mohs Microsurgery that is both more effective and less damaging. Mohs surgery is a ‘horizontal’ method, which follows the passage of the carcinoma, removing it from the flesh with as little damage as possible. If the vertical method is akin to open-cast mining, the Mohs method is more like following the seam of coal by tunnelling.
It wasn’t easy for my partner to change from a surgeon she knew, but I was able to show her a file I’d downloaded about the procedure and eventually she sought a second opinion (see http://www.mohscollege.org/about/video_patient_education.php). After that consultation she switched to a Mohs accredited microsurgeon. It turned out that her BCC was one of the very worst—it had long roots spiralling in all directions—up to her eye, in towards her nose and down to her lip. Getting it all required multiple Mohs procedures over an entire day, followed by many dozens of stitches and a skin graft. While this was traumatic, it seemed less consequential alongside our knowledge of how far more profoundly damaged her face would have been had she remained under the care of the first surgeon (who somehow neglected to mention Mohs as an option). Without the internet we’d have remained blithely ignorant—conceding all power and authority to the doctor, just like the good old days.
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Quoth Paul:
Am I the only one round here who used Internet in the 'eighties? When I went up to Nottingham University in 1983, I met Janet - the Joint Academic Network. Strictly speaking, she wasn't Internet but a private network of universities which plugged their Crays into one another.
I was there in the late 80s, and must post a suitably heartwarming story to this thread when I get the chance.
Although at a guess Janet was more likely VAXes (or VAXen to be geeky) than Crays. Used them both, and it is scary to think that an 80s vintage CRAY is roughly competitive with a Macbook Air :-)
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Without the internet we’d have remained blithely ignorant—conceding all power and authority to the doctor, just like the good old days.
Thanks for that, Paul. I know doctors probably hate it, and with some reason, but patient-empowerment via the internet can change lives, as your story shows.
My last Listener column was about the transformative experience of being able to reach out to other autism-spectrum families. And I'm bloody sure that helped us face down poorly-informed "experts" in the education system.
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@grumpykiwi:
Also contrary to the above, I actually wrote the first graphical installer for ICONZ in late 1994, at Jeremy's request, using a very early version of VB. Since I was still working for the Bank at the time, and knee deep in the Post Office integration, I didn't have a lot of time to maintain the code base, so it was eventually farmed out to a 3rd party company. Nic, I am guessing that was u?
Yup, tho we ended up working for ICONZ on contract, doing the help desk for a year or so. Sorry, I thought we were the "first" :(
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In about 1989 I was doing a communications software course at Waikato University in which we used a Unix box. I remember being told not to message or annoy one particular user if we saw him on there because he was connecting from (Cornell? Princeton? somewhere like that) to use the machine. It was one of those weird moments where you just think "huh!" and don't quite process the significance of it.
The community aspect of the net was what sucked me in. By about 1993 I was reading newsgroups on the Waikato VAX cluster and came across alt.tv.mst3k (about Mystery Science Theater 3000), when I asked what on earth this was all about somebody sent me tapes from the US. Unfortunately they were NTSC and used a super long recording format so I didn't actually get to watch them until some years later!
Somewhere along the line I got some of the old valve audio gear from Hamilton's Carlton Cinema when it closed down. The equipment was from 1953 and I knew nothing about it. A couple of questions on rec.audio.high-end and not only did I discover that McIntosh made very good gear, somebody ended up contacting the New York-based company on my behalf and mailing me brochures and circuit diagrams.
Once in all innocence I asked the good folk of alt.postmodern what postmodernism was all about. Talk about lighting the blue touchpaper and standing back! Won't be doing that again in a hurry...
I remember the few years when the internet had huge penetration in the academic community and almost none outside. In 1993 the hard rock guitarist George Lynch was reported to have died and the local rock station organised a big tribute show. I rang them and told them that it wasn't true and that I'd read about it on the internet. A deafening silence and then they hung up. Just not ready for it I guess.
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By about 1993 I was reading newsgroups on the Waikato VAX cluster and came across alt.tv.mst3k (about Mystery Science Theater 3000), when I asked what on earth this was all about somebody sent me tapes from the US.
Sigh. I so miss Usenet.
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MST3K... now *there* was a show.
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My treasured memory is the first time I was smacked for downloading too much from the 'internet', in 1985.
I had been working with the first PCs since 1982 as an MBasic programmer and got hired by Digital in 1984 to support their Rainbow PC. For $10K you got a dual-boot MS-DOS and CP/M PC with a 10MB hard drive. If you didn't pay $5K annual support you were almost guaranteed that the HDD would blow up and cost you the $5K to replace.
In between playing far too much Zork I discovered the wonderful DEC Notes discussion groups, which were for internal use only, but covered a myriad of topics. I really enjoyed the Politics group and harboured fond desires to travel to Nicaragua to support DEC systems and the revolution simultaneously - I got as far as visiting the Aeroflot offices in Auckland to find out the fare.
As well as my futile ambitions to travel to Latin America I was superficially involved in a plan to paddle protest canoes on Moruroa, to be launched from the Rainbow Warrior. One of the purposes of her last visit was supposedly to pick up the landing team in Auckland. I remember when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed (which my mate Garry, DEC's sysadmin, claimed to have heard) I posted on the DEC Politics Notes group the next day that I believed 'it was the bastard French'. I was quite pleased to be proved right some time later.
About that time I also discovered DEC's gateways into the ARPAnet and went looking for more games. I downloaded quite a few (which I don't think I ever played) over DEC NZ's satellite link through Fiji, before Garry came looking for whoever had wasted 5MB of the company's precious bandwidth.
I left DEC soon after (in disgust at their lack of appreciation for what PCs could do) to try to bring IT to broadcasting , and am still trying to do the same.
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I'm a believer.
In 1988 I was in a university politics class using SPSSX software to analyse election results. I had logged in to the computer using my name. My lecturer was talking to us all, showing how to prove quantitatively that farmers were more likely to vote National and that Maori were more likely to vote Labour. Suddenly a message popped up on the screen saying, "Jason, are you coming to see Paul Kelly tonight."
I was confused and intrigued. The computer wanted to be my friend? My lecturer freaked out and accused me of hacking into the system and causing trouble. It eventually clicked that my computer science (hons) flatmate had somehow sent me a message from the other side of the campus. I tried to explain this to my lecturer, but he just wanted me to fix what I'd interfered with. I had to log out and back away from the screen.
That night my flatmate explained he'd been doing some sort of audit of the network and found me there by chance. Being a bit slow witted I didn't fully appreciate the implications of our campus network being linked to other institutions around the world and what this enabled.
A few years later I got it - and got an email address through Wellington City Council. I had to go to their offices to use it. It was a revolution in terms of communicating with family overseas. It was even more convenient when ISPs and home dial up came along. Reading the overseas news got me a day ahead of the Dom. My partner decided I needed a suit and when I said I couldn't afford it she found one for me off Ebay. Later, when Napster appeared I was happy to wait the couple of hours to download each track.
By 2001 it had got to the point where the Internet was not only a productive work and social tool for me, but also my first choice for time wasting. I was in Hong Kong, playing an online game while waiting for my partner to fly in from London. One of my opponents suddenly typed, "America's under attack, they just bombed the Trade Towers in New York." My partner got home a few hours later but there were some unpleasant hours trying to track down a relative on a flight to New York. The mobile phones weren't working in NYC and I got my information from employees of the Internet company I worked for. We got in touch with the brother in law by email - his flight had been diverted to Canada and he was able to let us know he'd be home in a couple of days. [Sorry about turning this into a 9/11 story]
The Internet has delivered so much more in the last few years - what next?
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By comparison to most here, I was a late adopter.
My first time on the internet was at MOTAT, the museum of science and technology, in 1996. There was an exhibition of various amazing technologies, and the internet was one. I was a 12 year old at the time, and I was interested in cars, so plugged in the address for Ferrari. After about a minute the page came up, and I attempted to watch a short video clip, with no idea about how ridiculous that idea was at the time. Twenty minutes later, about 30 seconds of a car racing round a circuit had been downloaded, in quality that makes YouTube look like cinema.
It wasn't until 1998 that I used the web again, and by then everything seemed fast, efficient, and usable. By 2000 I was living on the internet.
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I first went online in 1994 when the University of Otago started handing out stonebow email addresses to students. The Stonebow is one of the two bridges that crosses the Brandywine river in the Shire (the pop server was brandywine).
For a few weeks it seems relatively useless. It was all held on a floppy disk, and I'd go in and check once a day, and no one would email me. Not unsurprising as I didn't know anyone in the world who had an email address.
I had a play with gopher, and managed to find some email lists of interest - left-wing student politics stuff, mostly from the USA. That started to fill up my inbox, and link what I was doing in my real life with the 'virtual world'.
One day I got an email from a person in Baltimore USA, who had been searching for the email of a friend with a similar name. She emailed me to introduce herself, and we emailed back and forth. A couple of months later I was spending my nights in computer labs, emailing her a dozen times a night, and spending my time in between chatting on a talker. Phone calls, presents, photos etc all followed, and in June 1995 I flew to America to spend five weeks with her. In a somewhat sad stereotype, 'internet love' was my first serious relationship.
We drove down to New Orleans and back, I hung out at her work when she wasn't able to get leave etc. Things were OK, but they didn't feel perfect like they should. After I returned I decided that it really wasn't a great relationship, and broke it off. She went what can only be described as a little bit 'internet psycho' - getting friends to harass me in chat rooms, logging in as multiple personalities, posting stories about me. I just stopped talking to her altogether and eventually she stopped.
A couple of years later she contacted me again to see how I was. I was distant, and she talked about things and people that we had spoken about in an 'update' kind of way. Except time had made her get her stories crossed. Things didn't match what she had told me years before, people got crossed over. What used to be two friends was now the same person. I had kept the thousands of emails that we had sent each other, and I went back and looked and came to the conclusion that at some part of what she told me was a lie constructed in her mind. So I took it all and jumped in my Dad's car, drove around central wellington at 2am, and found a rubbish bin to dump it all in. It felt great too.
I heard from her again a couple of years ago and she married some guy that she didn't really love, moved towns and jobs to something she hates, and sounded terrible. I didn't have it within me to care however. The internet has offered me much better since (I also met my current partner online, but she's a local).
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Memorable stuff for me:
My first experience programming a computer ~1974 using port-a-punch fortran. Waiting a week for the printout to come back only to discover a syntax error.
Going online to videotex at 1200/75 with chunky 'graphics'.
Hacking 1200/75 videotex modems to enable operation at 300bps to access bulletin boards, as the modems had only been 'type approved' for 1200/75.
Starting the 1st BBS in the South Island. You couldn't buy an auto-answer modem in those days, you had to rent one from [what became] telecom. It was huge, but through some quirk in their billing system we never got billed for the rental.
Using the tie-lines to Wellington at work to access actrix, as that was the only internet access option available.
Starting an ISP so I could access the internet from home.
Meeting my future wife on soc.culture.new-zealand in 1993.
Seeing what happens to systems operated on trust [like email & usenet] once you let everyone use it.
Getting broadband in 2008 as our exchange has _finally_ been upgraded.
Reading Connecting the Clouds and discovering that almost everything written about me [even my name] is incorrect.
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i'm looking at my flatmate and saying, "you've got a what? a modem?
"does this mean we can hack into the US military establishment and start a world war? because, well, i'm a little bored today."
it's 1992 and he's got an external modem that he plugs the phone line into, and i'm all like, "ccooooooooolllll..... i thought it'd be one of those fkcers you drop the phone onto, but this ill be sweet.
"now what?
"so what are all those numbers? are they like personal details of political figures that we can blackmail and make a lot of money?
"no? oh.
"aeh? chess scores?
"from the 'server' up at victoria university?
"so, um, what's a server?
"oh.
"yup.
"a-hah.
"yup.
"ah. i see. so what else does this thing do?
"nothing? really? so when do we talk to the supercomputer at the pentagon and play the waragames?
"we don't?
"stink."
it was two more years before i could download pron...
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I worked for a research organisation that, in the late 80s or perhaps early 90s, hooked up to the Internet through IBM ATs. On the first occasion I used the Internet connection to access information held in the US I thought it would take some minutes to retrieve, but amazingly it arrived in only seconds! The info must have been stored at the organisation's subsidiary in Wellington, I told myself, because it couldn't possibly have come all the way from America in that time. It was some weeks before a colleague could convince me otherwise.
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The info must have been stored at the organisation's subsidiary in Wellington, I told myself, because it couldn't possibly have come all the way from America in that time. It was some weeks before a colleague could convince me otherwise.
And that was when the whole country was on a 256k pipe.
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