As for MULTICS, isn’t that the OS developed by St Peter?

Giggle… how about warbled connections over a normal audio phone line (and some people could warble up a handshake with their throat. Tranmission speed was probably slower than a fast typist, and took between five and ten seconds to type a line of text. It was almost faster to walk across town carrying your card desk or paper tape. (As for later magnetic media, and 1600 bits per inch you could “cut and paste”, literally, with not much data lost over the splice).

Netscape was King?? Naaaa, Mosaic was the original king of GUI browsers, and had features STILL not found in some modern browsers (buttons to navigate according to metadata tags, GUI settings of fonts and sizes to different markup instructions (e.g. set H2 to Helvetica 14pt underlined). Of course, there was no Windows version, as Microsoft didn’t even include the TCP/IP stack on their distribution media, so there wasn’t much point unless you went through the hassle of going to Waterloo to get one.

Jacques said:
* In the beginning was Unix
Hmmmmm. What about MULTICS??? All the decent operating systems (e.g. VMS and Unix, and of course, the cute PDP series) came from lessons learned from the MULTICS initiative. Indeed, the word “UNIX” is a pun implied a cut-down version of MULTICS…. EUNUCHS!

Mind you, I agree (as is so often the case) with the thrust of Jacques’ positions.

My two cents on what the “Fourth Generation” might be is community edited sites + personal member blogs + social networking site features. We’re going to see (and are already seeing) the standalone social networking stuff merge with the blog community stuff. The blogging community tools encourage ongoing communication, and the social networking tools help groups form and keep connected, online and off. It’s a natural (please avert your eyes while I use this loathsome word:) “convergence” for both kinds of sites.

I actually go there daily, but mostly to read the diary section. It has been a long time since I last read a story that made its way out of the queue, but they do exist. They are just too long for me to bother reading.

As for .plan files, they died because of the security risk of finger. When many people have weak passwords it is very beneficial to know what usernames to try!

I never quite made the connect between .plan files and blogs myself. Although a Linux user for many years, I never actually used it for work. Unless you were on an always-on network (most of us Linux users were on modems), there wasn’t much point.

For me, the online social networks really developed from local, multi-line BBSs (many years ago I spent most evenings logged onto a 6-line Victorian BBS called Empire), through to UseNet to places like Slashdot (I still have a low five-figure User ID on Slashdot) and eventually to blogs.

I haven’t been on K5 now for many years, but they had a ‘journal’ section (I’m pretty sure they had it before Slashdot), where you could post your own story and allow comments. That was back before RSS feeds, so it encouraged you to log on regularly to see if anyone had commented. That was my first blog-type experience (complete with flames and all).

I’m not even sure if Kuro5hin is still active, but what killed it for me was that all of the interesting discussion would occur in the story voting phase, and by the time it actually hit the front page, it was old news. I think MetaFilter has probably filled the hole left by K5. Unlike other social blogs like digg, the links are interesting, but comments are the best part of MeFi.

Interestingly, in the last few days Slashdot has announced ‘firehose’, which sounds a lot like K5′s story voting system. It will be interesting to see if they manage to maintain a balance between those who get in early to vote on stories, and those who just want to read the front page.

The really cool modern movies before that had teenage hackers with phone handsets they planted into some sort of special cradle.

An acoustic coupler. The early modems occasionally had to work with telephones you couldn’t unplug and you needed the telephone itself to do the dialling. Modems are one thing I do not miss. Usenet might still be around, but it has never been the same since the majority of the audience was overtaken by the great unwashed – not that I resent the presence of non-geeks but the threads were often so geek-biased it was fascinating just what a distributed mono-culture existed amongst them.

Ive never seen a clear exposition about why Atom is/was/will be such a big deal.

And you never will. It was always about big egos clashing.

cheers,
Christopher

I thought the first internety/bloggy things were Bulletin Boards, werent they?

In practice Usenet came first, though some BBs like WELL are of similar vintage. There was also FIDOnet, which was a Usenet-like site-to-site system between bulletin boards running the Fido software. It was later folded into Usenet.

I thought the first internety/bloggy things were Bulletin Boards, weren’t they? which have morphed into today’s open source BBs and forums which are still fairly popular.

Something I want in the future is, rather than linking off to another blog (or whatever), to be able to display an external post or comment in my own blog – “placed” but not imported (so without infringing copyright) – as part of a thread of several people’s ideas which I might be constructing. So it would be a community of debate rather than just my own opinion.
Group hug?

Atom is yet to be implemented

I’ve never seen a clear exposition about why Atom is/was/will be such a big deal. RSS as it exists today seems to do what needs to be done. What am I missing?

As for spam-by-thread-union, that’s a toughie. A web of trust model, perhaps? Then you’re getting back to the SIOC problem: a grand vision with no implementation and no way to easily fold it into the writing experience of Nick Gruens and Ken Parishes.

Anyway, it’s an interesting idea. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it tried. I remember a few years ago when I would spend hours tracking the movements of the meta-blog crowd there was an attempt to do something like this, Threadneedle. Never went anywhere though, mostly because all the blog APIs at the time sucked. Given that the blog APIs now are basically the same as then – Atom is yet to be implemented – the SIOC boys are at this stage trying to solve step 3 without solving step 2.

Speaking of ideas kicked around with Cam, he has been bored stupid on a number of occasions on my fear of a spam planet. Spam always wins. Too much money in it, so it is like herpes; just when you think you’ve beaten it down, it comes back itchier than ever. I imagine imaginative spammers secretly dream of this kind of thing as it solves one of their only remaining problems. It is trivially easy to fill up the comment threads of a d-list blog, less so on a heavily-read blog. Weaving together the comment threads of A- and D- list blogs means spammers can target the D-Listers and still have the ads read by readers of the A-listers.

Akismet? Bah! Give me a million dollars and I’ll hire a thousand Chinese girls tired of making bra strap clips and they’ll overload Akismet with hand-posted spam comments :- )

For simplicity I think the best way to do it is mutually exchanged RSS feeds of comments. Trackbacks could be used to identify where else the conversation is taking place. Or we could throw our hat into the SIOC all-encompassing vision ring, though experience shows that the good beats the perfect.

Cam and I have kicked the idea around a few times. It’d probably wind up being a reinvention of NNTP as a WordPress plugin. But it’s problematic: what happens when your cat blog gets its thread union’d with Slashdot because you posted about Cats 2.0?