Well I spotted this Frazz cartoon today (anyone else think he’s a grown up Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes?)

and it got me to thinking. I had mentioned the Green Card spam to a co-worker of mine and he hadn’t recognized it.

Yikes. I mean, that marked a turning point in the Internet for me. There was never any turning back after that. It’s a little difficult describing the Internet as it was back then to someone today. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not going on about some halcyon Golden Years or something. There’s a lot of good that’s come along with the bad. I absolutely relish the amount of information available online and how I can search for all kinds of things.

At the same time, there are things that I miss. For example, every email that I got was from someone I knew. I’d reply to each and every one of them too, often taking a considerable amount of time and care in composing the reply. People nowadays scarcely know what Usenet newsgroups are (think of there being one single forum, containing all the topics as different threads, freewheeling through the Internet), but again, those were very tightly knit communities by and large. Each one had its own character, of course, but everyone was on their set of groups because they had something to say.

And given that back then the dominant providers were all universities, you had a remarkably high percentage of intelligent and highly educated people on the Internet (not necessarily any nicer; there are classic flamewars I can recall involving the likes of weemba, Richard Sexton, Oleg Kisilev and others — now that’s some well crafted stuff. I mean, these guys were slinging multisyllabic mud ).

Also, because at the time the funding and backbone was provided by the NFS, all commercial activity was prohibited (this ended in 1995) during that time. So imagine a community of university folks, librarians (these guys were big time early information sharers, which is often overlooked), and some government types. Getting online was tough, with tools few and often unfriendly. (”GUI’s? What, are you high?”) So just being online was already an announcement of your personal geekhood. Also, if you weren’t at a university, with the nice T1 connections? I have one sentence for you: 1200 baud rate hell.

The atmosphere was just a bit different then.

Once the commercial spam started, though, the Usenet newsgroups were finished. They took their time dying, of course, and although the carcass may still be feebly kicking, there’s no point in reading that anymore, even though it spawned so much stuff still around today. (Ever wonder where the concept (and acronym) of FAQ came from? Terminology like trolling, spam, smilies (tm for fuck’s sake, now), and so on? Yep.)

Interestingly, the spam moved on to the chat rooms which had been emerging at about this time due to all the private bulletin boards that started to integrate into the Internet. I recall all the various predictions of the Death of the Internet — News at 11 that came with Delphi, with AOL, with Compuserv, with GEnie and so many others’ entry to the Internet. (Yes, the Internet existed and exists as a separate entity from AOL, a fact I find hard to explain to some people these days.) And yet, we absorbed these people, learned to deal with massive numbers of folks who had no clue whatsoever what the Internet was or how it worked. We had culture clashes and swirls and eddies.

In any case, IRC and chat rooms and such boomed, and then fell apart as spambots invaded those too. These days its comment-spam. (For an interesting summary of the history of spam, see this by another person who’s a blast from the past. In particular, I distinctly recall jj’s college fund. I was a denizen of the moria newsgroup at that point, and parodied him by sending out a call for code, so I could finally, at last, someday, complete my program. It was a hit — many people got a chuckle out of it, and did contribute code. One person said “Here’s /* — it may not be much, but you can use it in lots of places!”)

Hmph. I see I’m rambling all over.

What I note is the constant move toward individually controlled entities. My own progression was from the Usenet groups to Listserv mailing lists. I ran a number of these mailing lists, and learned to be quite ruthless with the membership to keep them viable, interesting, and useful for the subscribers. Then I moved on to websites, archiving many faqs that I’d put together in previous years. In the late 90’s I collaborated with several other women on a website that, looking back on it now, was an early blog, back when there was no software for that kind of thing. We’d go in and edit in new things manually, although I wrote a number of utilities for storing our articles in a MySQL database, and another one of us had the idea of tagging our posts (calling them keywords then, of course).

In a way I think blogs are moving toward the old Usenet model as much as possible while retaining the individual control — and the spam’s response is indicative of that, I think. Consider the blog: first most blogs were simply daily updates by their owners, without comments. Then commenting ability was added. Then spam showed up. So anti-spam software developed to help the bloggers control that. Now you see features such as threaded comments, and even utilities such as coComments that help you track all your comments in a single place (very Beta-ish but lots of potential for usefulness), or rss feeds to subscribe to.

Threaded comments and crossposting? These are not new concepts. They’ve been around for decades, mostly on unix machines with difficult to use command line interfaces. That’s something else that I’ve observed over the last fifteen years, too. There were many concepts that were around and implemented long ago, but the interface was too difficult and technical. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s that there was much in the way of graphical interfaces to the Internet available (this is also what spurred on marriages such as AOL and the Internet), but these graphical interfaces started back at ground zero with many of the concepts the comand line interfaces were using! This is why I was such a die hard command line interface user up until about a year or two ago (even now, my work Windows computer functions largely as a station for my ssh connections to our resident unix machine). I simply couldn’t find the level of functionality I was used to, even though the eye candy was so much nicer.

Let me give an example. Until recently, I used the same mail program I had used since I first got on the net (mid 80’s if you must know): the MH mail program (look about half way down for example usage, this is NOT the unix barebones mail program which is all but unusable ). Why did I use this antiquity? Because it was completely programmable. From the first day I used it, I was able to:

1. sort incoming mail in different folders depending on who sent it
2. threaded views, if I wanted (I didn’t appreciate this sort of ability until much later; it’s something that’s best with bulk amounts of stuff)
3. block out mail I didn’t want
4. send out automated messages in some circumstances (eg, vacation, an admin type email)
5. put different emails into different folders based on topics — all email from my advisor in one folder, all email regarding this project into that one, all email I had to answer within the day to another, a sent folder (also sorted out) for my outgoing mail
6. customize it with my own programs — I’d write something to parse it and do something and be able to add it in and have it function with the rest of the stuff. An early example was the retrieval of files I made available to the public via email with a certain syntax in the subject line

Now you tell me which of the modern email programs acquired that level of functionality when? I doubt Outlook is anywhere close to that yet. I was continually frustrated at the extremely primitive level of filtering available. (What do I finally use? Gmail, Thunderbird, and Evolution are all pretty impressive at this point, although I can’t quite customize them the way I used to in MH anymore I find that these days I really don’t need to anyway — there’s lots of other tools that do a better job. If I want to make something available, I’ll just do it over my blog or another website anyway. So there you go.)

Anyway, I have no doubt the next fifteen years will be as interesting. Maybe by then I’ll be sending out holo-casts!