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Today's youth are terribly smug about being the first generation to grow up with the internet. The reaction of a 14-year-old to the realisation that, when you were young, you had to phone your friends, rather than using Facebook chat and that you couldn't copy all your history homework from Wikipedia
is, typically "OMG!!!".
Therefore, it logically follows that what is needed is an alternative history of the internet which sets out its origins as an entirely paper-based service (someone can write a fake version of IP v1.0 to support this) reliant on the postal system, vacuum tubes and carrier pigeons for the transport layer. Then, the all-electric internet came out of Bell Labs as a "swords to ploughshares" reuse of World War II technology. Facebook and Yahoo! instant messenger were introduced in the late 1940's as radio-based services - by tuning your radio to the right station you could hear your friends' status updates. Youtube was introduced at much the same time, as the mainstream way of delivering television content - only later did the technology evolve to broadcasting it simultaneously into every home.
Semaphore line
http://en.wikipedia...wiki/Semaphore_line
An early ISP's backbone [pocmloc, Sep 30 2009]
Sumerian 'Me' or 'Instructions about how to do stuff'.
http://en.wikipedia...wiki/Me_(mythology)
It was not the Ancient Greeks, Mr Tindale, but the Sumerians who invented programming! [knowledge gained courtesy of Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash']. [DrBob, Oct 01 2009]
[link]
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All because of a nice man named Al, who was made to sound as though he had uttered an inconvenient lie. |
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I love this idea but i can't think of anything to say. I just wanted you to know that. |
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Of course, the very name 'YouTube' actually comes from the internet's original implementation by pre-First World War ham radio enthusiasts.
In the balloon-pricking stakes, it might also be worthwhile to point out the irony of the modern internet now becoming 'wireless'. |
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We could always tell them about the days of ftp.wustl.edu, bulletin board services and alt.barney.die.die.die. |
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Of course the binary code was an adaptation of Marconi's telegraph in collaboration with Morse... |
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...which was itself derived from numerically-expressed measurements of the angles of semaphore flags. The Antikythera Device had a heliograph-based interface message processor. |
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Ah smoke signals... I remember those days. Low bandwidth they had. |
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<nineteen forty eight>Luxury! We used to use polyzoan colonies.</nineteen forty eight> |
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Of course, all signals travelled at the speed of sound, until Albert Einstein came along and then we could get wireless transmissions at much higher bandwidth, because of his inventiveness. |
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but we didn't need the higher bandwidth since the world was all black&white until the early 60's. |
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It took a while to figure out what that genius Newton was on to, when he showed light was more than just white, with his prism. |
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I've heard that until the mid 1990s, there were only 16 colours. It wasn't until then that Microsoft and Windows invented the other millions, despite some urban myths about how Apple got there first. |
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It just goes to show.
Even the Apple logo itself was scooped up the instant that the statute of limitations on Newton's copyright expired. |
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Ohmygod Imsototallytweetingthis myfriendsallneedtoknow howtheinternetstarted! |
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(Well I never, there's a thirty character limit on words!) |
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I remember when amazon had high-street stores. Those were the days. |
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I remember their first. Founded by a tribe of tall women in a hut on the river bank. |
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The Ancient Greeks, of course, invented programming
and web design. The ancient Romans invented Unix. |
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//Apple logo itself was scooped up the instant that the statute of limitations on Newton's copyright // |
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That Apple logo, if you look, has a bite out of it. It's obviously a reference to the earliest knowledge of, and warnings against, 'net pornography in the garden of Eden. |
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Remember when Twitter was passing handwritten notes under desks, at the back of the classroom? |
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breaker breaker that's an eighty eight - go to channel 41 - copy? |
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Did you know that the SMS 160 character limit (from
which Twitter's 117.5 character limit) came about
because 160 is the average count of how many dips of a
quill into the ink would be made by ancient scribes
living in ancient Egypt carving out stone tablets with
classified ads on for public consumption. |
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Very interesting [Ian]. Isn't MS Comic Sans based on late demotic scripts? Or was it the other way round? I can never remember. |
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OMG, did you know that Wikipedia used to be, like, an old-fashioned book, owned by the Queen of England, and static, so no-one could change it when Brittany decided to kiss some chick on stage? |
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The standard server rack system dimensions were derived from the best packaging space in railroad cars, which as we all know were fitted to the width of Roman chariot wheel ruts. |
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Urban myths weren't around then... |
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[RS], cable size was also based on the width of a horse's arse. This fact used to be well known but was supressed by prudish Victorian society, hence the term banned-width. |
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I still remember having to follow "post-office protocol version 1" at the local post office in order to have them accept my hand-labelled TCP/IP packages. |
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2400 bps? That's like going backwards, right? |
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Yeah; so, there was this port called the serial port. If you were lucky, you had three of them. You put the keyboard into one, the mouse into the other, and the modem in the third. Of course, most machines only had two serial ports so in order to dial up you had to activate 'mouse keys' and disconnect the mouse, replacing it with the modem and navigate using the cursor keys. Ahh, shoot, forgot this was meant to be fictional :p |
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And the Web originated in 13th century Florence, when posters and handbills would be tacked up on the walls about the city. The lively political, philosophical and theological debates of the age meant that many bills referred to, or refuted, other bills, which were "linked" for reference. To fully comprehend the discussion, one could choose to follow these "links" to the original document. |
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Links were printed as dotted quads, thus: 192.168.2.254, and following a link involved walking the given number of paces, taking a bearing with an astrolabe and/or theodolite, counting off a measure of rosaries, and measuring the number of handspans up from the ground. |
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This created such a commotion, that, after an outbreak of fisticuffs and swordplay, the Medicis divided the city into "domaynes". Links could be addressed by easily remembered names, and Domayne Name Scribes were stationed about the city, who consulted tables of names and locations to guide the weary searcher in their travels. |
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Then, in 1463, when the northern states were conquered by the Ottoman emperor Gogol ... |
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