Lo and behold: the second edition of Marianna Baranovska-Bölter's and my essay collection on #Weizenbaum's #ELIZA is "in print" now! It should be out in july!
Someone kicked a decade of seminal pre-internet communications off the internet.
We all know Google Search has seriously degraded, with tons of duplicate and garbage content from content farms (which I’m sure carry lots of Google ads, so perhaps they don’t care—we're not the customer). But also, searching for my own name (which is globally unique) no longer returns nearly as much as it used to. It used to have hundreds if not thousands of hits to various mailing lists archives, not to mention old Usenet posts, and everything I've written online since.
So for fun, I did a search and ran down the list. Basically, after about 44 results, it’s just a mix of Mastodon posts (often reshares, and not including my profile), an occasional random mailing list post, and references to my megapost on Pseudonyms from the Google+ nymwars.
But here’s the shocker.
The Usenet results are gone.
When I set the date restrictions on my name search, I can’t find anything before 1992. Some of that is because individual articles aren’t being stored on web sites anymore, and the few mailing list archives don’t have dates that Google recognizes. And I thought maybe that was the case for Usenet as well, but nope. It’s been removed from the internet because of some asshole apparently went after them with lawyers to get something redacted. I used to be able to search for things I wrote back in the early 80’s. But no longer.
That’s painful. An important part of internet history erased. (I know, people have private copies of the archive, I even know some of them, but that’s not the same).
For what it’s worth. This is what I got from Google. And there’s more details on the UtZoo Usenet archive at the bottom of this post. There's no blog posts of mine here because they are all offline right now, but I'll fix that soon. Those will go back to 1997.
The weighting here is very biased towards commercial walled gardens. It's clearly no longer based on references from other sites, or my Pseudonym megapost would be much higher. It's based on status of web sites, not content. It's biased against content.
LinkedIn
Instagram
Academia.edu
Flickr (haven't posted anything there in years)
YouTube (ditto)
www.Pinterest (very ditto, not sure I've ever posted anything there)
Quora (ditto)
Apollo.io (scraped from LinkedIn, well done Google)
<break for some images, all actually mine>
Usenix.org (paper I'm listed as a co-author on)
Goodreads
GitHub
Facebook
Foursquare (ancient)
W3C.org (mailing list post from 1996...the first hit that I'd consider old-style internet content)
Gawker (article about a blog post I made about a Sarah Lacy interview with Zuck a long time ago—I mapped twitter sentiment to the video to the interview)
ThreadReaderApp (some of my twitter threads)
Palmer House Inn (article about Sandy Neck Lighthouse that mentions me)
Infosec Exchange (finally, Mastodon, my most active social media)
opensource.apple.com (some code I wrote a very long time ago)
tr.pinterest (WTF google? Again?)
Tribute Archive (my aunt's obit)
PCWorld on abcnews.go.com (mention of a blog post I wrote analyzing the Google Orkut worm--remember Orkut?)
blogs.gnome.org (kurt von finck's blog referencing a tiny blog post I made about being in Maine)
perl.apache.org (changelog for Embperl mentioning a bug I reported)
Stack Overflow (my home page, again, old)
ScienceDirect (description of a paper I wrote for INTERACT '87)
support.google.com (support question)
Ad, offering to search about info about me in Maine (presumably because that's my current location)
cohost.org (post, summary oddly pulls in the last sentence of my bio, which is mentions my daughter)
spaf.cerias.purdue.edu (Yucks Digest V2, a (true story) joke I posted to rec.humor.funny (Hi @spaf)
Birdeye.com, a review of their dog doors four years ago.
unice.fr (a copy of the emacs bindings I made for Mac text areas)
Forbes.com (a comment on an article about Dragon Systems, with the wrong summary)
IRTF Anti-spam Research Group thread (another mailing list archive)
UCLA (reference to the web version of Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest that I maintained through 2004)
A reshared mastodon post about XYZ on DTSS
Another mastodon reshare
NetBSD (same software Apple had)
More Mastodon (this time my pixelfed account)
Playstation.net (copyright for same software again; in BSD libc)
perl.org (a mailing list post)
justia.com (a patent, the rest show up eventually elsewhere, very random)
tronche.com (Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual for X Version 11, R6. Thanks for being in the public review)
After that, it's basically Mastodon posts and occasional mailing lists, and some references to my megapost on Pseudonyms. I used to be able to find Usenet stuff using a date limit to the 80's, but not anymore. If I date limit, I find the earliest content is 1992 (A Google Groups post, a mention in the Motif Programming Manual ("just because he's cool" 🤣)), and more copies of the ICCCM manual.
Searching for my name and “usenet” gets a usenet search engine, which does not appear to be working. http://benschmidt.org/usenet/, the reason becomes clear…
Looking at archive.org/usenet, I find the quote below. As of 2020, they are offline. WTF?
> This is not a collection of the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive.
>
> In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.
>
> Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials.
No wonder it's not in search anymore. What the fuck.
If I search for "apollo!nazgul", I only find 7 results.
A decade of my life, of many people's lives, got erased from the internet.
My understanding is that Bill English/ARC/The Augment group at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) under Doug(las) Engelbart experimented with various pointing devices, before settling on a 3 button mouse.
Some iterations had fewer (perhaps even no? I don't recall) buttons, some had as many as five buttons I seem to recall?
They even purportedly experimented with a pointing that was driven by knee movements (presumably to allow the hands to be free for other things, though perhaps this may have also been useful for accessibility much in the way there are some alternative pointing devices based upon eye tracking or breathing in more recent decades)
In SRI's studies apparently 3 buttons was considered ideal by most users?
Admittedly, they experimented with a lot of other things when it came to user input too.
For example, instead of relying solely on a QWERTY keyboard layout, NLS used a "chorded" keyboard (image attached).
Similar to playing notes on piano keys, or stenographer keyboards, multiple keys could be held simultaneously, to produce different characters.
Presumably due to the versatility of the chorded keyset (typically used by the left hand) excessive buttons on the mouse (typically used by the right hand) made it such that 3 buttons seemed sufficient?
I hadn't thought about it this way, but Michał Sapka's post made me realize computer history helps make sense of the present of technology. It's an insightful tool for understaning what the latest developments are really about and cutting through the hype cycles of the industry.
The story of how David Huffman came up with his lossless compression scheme, due to a challenge by his professor.
"Huffman’s approach has turned out to be so powerful that, today, nearly every lossless compression strategy uses the Huffman insight in whole or in part."
The @verge’s #Apple documentary, “Apple’s Secret Burial” about the death and literal burial of the Apple Lisa and the secrets uncovered, has gone live.
Here’s the link. Video is about 30m long. Terrific story. 👏🏻🍿
In 2014 my book Re-collection noted that emulating the defunct Silicon Graphics platform would resurrect groundbreaking works by artists like @golan, Char Davies, and Karl Sims. Reanimating SGI is a notoriously thorny challenge, but according to @ernie we could be $6,500 away from approaching this dream.
TIL: HP produced a rap promo video for the introduction of the first Series700 #PARISC#workstations (“Snakes”) in 1991. Peak late 1980s… #ComputerHistory
We just got a scan of the first commercially released game for the Commodore Amiga. It's the early version of Monkey Business, a Donkey Kong clone.
You can read more about the history of the game in the notes section here: http://hol.abime.net/6288 #Amiga#Retrogaming#ComputerHistory
A unique bit of #ComputerHistory, the NexGen Nx586 featured an onboard #RISC CPU along with an integrated translation processor that would convert x86 instructions to RISC instructions on the fly.
Designed to compete against Intel’s Pentium CPUs, it was actually ahead of its time, but suffered from technical limitations. The company was purchased by #AMD in 1996 and the technology was later used in their #K6 line of CPUs.
One of the earliest things I vividly recall reading online was when I was working for a summer at Bell Labs and I read this in my USENET feed. I lost my printout of it during a move in the late 80’s, but in ‘97 John Gregor was nice enough to track down an online version and I’ve hung onto it ever since.
Keep in mind that at the time, only knew of “icon” from anthropology, and “mouse” from my attic. That said, I kind of got the idea.
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Sun Jul 12 06:05:32 1981
Re: Context Managers
From LEAVITT@USC-ISI Sun Jul 12 05:59:37 1981
Well, why wouldn't a standard file-delete command be implemented by a little waste-basket-shaped icon? And EXPUNGE would be represented by moving a mouse from a
match icon to the waste basket icon?
It's interesting how reading USENET newsgroups was such a big part of the early Linux history. It actually makes sense now that it is pointed out. This was the late-1980s/early-1990s equivalent of "social media", where discussions happened digitally, etc. Before the web it was also a huge source of information that was otherwise much harder to come by. Either way, a great post by Lars Wirzenius reminiscing about the pre-1.0, the very first time Linux was ever installed, and even pre-Linux days going all the way back to Linus's first multi-threading x86 assembly program. What I'd love to see is a demo of Linux from that era :). #linux#ComputerHistory#RetroComputing#LinusTolvaldslwn.net/Articles/928581/
OTD 1968 - "First software patent" granted to Applied Data Research. Patent was overtly software, whereas previous algorithmic patents were described as hardware (much as the UNIX set-uid patent). The beginning of the software-as-property era. I had a brief part-time job with ADR back when I was at Princeton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_Data_Research#ComputerHistory
TIL: Even if you couldn't afford disk OR tape for your IBM 360, you could still get an all-card OS and Fortran IV too! (1966). Punched cards were a primary storage medium -- until well into the 70s, a box of punched cards was way more memory than most machines had as core. 2000 cards * 80 bytes = 160K #ComputerHistory#Fortran