Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream
basement.
posted by samhyland
on Dec 20, 2012 -
45 comments
The concept behind
VoyURL is simple: A browser plugin records your every click, which you can then choose to share publicly in a real-time feed. Their website
analyzes and
shows you your online history in customized infographics, to identify patterns, recommend content and help you learn more about the way you use the internet. You can see the browsing history of all users in one giant timeline or follow a specific user. The service is currently in beta, but you can slip in
here or
here.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 16, 2011 -
35 comments
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA. "Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already gotten wired. Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the
transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War. Americans soon saw that a
breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives."
posted by homunculus
on Oct 23, 2011 -
49 comments
"[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved." Now, one year later, they have announced that nearly
a terabyte of web history will soon be made available to the public as
a 900GB torrent file.
(Previously. / Previously.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 29, 2010 -
57 comments
Cybersyn (or Synco, in Spanish) was computer network constructed in 1970 by an English/Chilean team headed by cyberneticist
Stafford Beer (his
papers). Cybersyn was an electronic nervous system for the Chilean economy, linking together mines, factories and so on, to better manage production and give workers a clear idea of what was in demand and where. The network was destroyed by the army after the 1973 coup. Later that year Stafford Beer drew upon the lessons of Cybersyn to write
Fanfare for Effective Freedom, a eulogy for Allende and Cybersyn, and
Designing Freedom, a series of six lectures he gave for CBC, outlining his ideas. Besides the first link in this post, the best place to start is
this Guardian article from 2003. If you want to go more in-depth, read Eden Medina's
Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. And if nothing else, just take a look at the amazing
Cybersyn control room.
posted by Kattullus
on Mar 21, 2010 -
32 comments
The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.
The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses:
Defending the Library of Google,
The Future in the Past and
Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 1, 2008 -
22 comments
Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as
Personalized Google and
NetVibes, there was
CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted by divabat
on Mar 28, 2007 -
11 comments
The Future Just Happened A series of four BBC programmes about the internet from five years ago watchable online (via pre-broadband 56k real) that provide a snapshot of a time when AOL was 'at the heart of the new world', Marillion were releasing music through fan subscriptions and Monica Lewinsky was talking about how she didn't trust email anymore. Amazing.
posted by feelinglistless
on Jun 4, 2006 -
9 comments
Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness
Email Roulette (which we've
seen before) is my favorite application of email.
TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous
Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of
browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted by majick
on May 18, 2006 -
12 comments
The Virtual Museum of Canada has funded or collaborated on almost
150 virtual exhibits, mostly relating to Canadian History and Culture. There is great diversity, among my favourites are
Nk'Mip Nation Aboriginal Childrens' Art from the Inkameep day school (a welcome counterpoint to the
residential schools tragedy), the historic re-photography and soundscapes of
Montreal, Haida Culture
documented , and also compared to
Inuit Culture, Inuit (Eskimo)
games and
3-dimensional (VR) sculpture, a history of the
Canadian Trucking Industry, a splendid overview of
Canadian documentary film making, Canadian
design in the late 20th century, and the
Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island. There is also a searchable
image gallery. The only thing missing is a historical
whodunnit or
two (or
three). All sites available in both French and English, and some in other languages too.
posted by Rumple
on Nov 25, 2004 -
17 comments
A nice article on some of the engineering and economics aspects of WiFi, and the history of frequency regulation in the USA.
posted by freebird
on Aug 16, 2004 -
9 comments
Internet To Be Bigger Than TV - UCLA Report "For the first time in the history of television, TV usage by children under 14 declined," recalled Cole. "Kids finally found something that was more interesting than TV. It was an epiphany moment for me." Download the report
here.
posted by owillis
on Oct 25, 2000 -
5 comments
Al Gore and the Internet A post to nettime from
Vinton Cerf, someone who knows a little something about the development of the internet (he led the development of TCP/IP), giving Al Gore props for taking initiative for creating the Internet. Al never said he "invented" the internet. But he's had a lot of influence in creating the internet we all know and love.
I have no interest in toadying for Gore, but it does bother me how people parrot the misattributed quote, and seemingly have no desire to know how things really developed.
posted by peterme
on Oct 2, 2000 -
4 comments
Yes, Virginia, there was life before the Internet... ...but nobody's bothered to archive it yet. Thanks to those wacky .edu's, there's a fair amount of historical data out there, but if you're hoping the newspapers who charge for archive "reprints" will have material from the '40s, the '60s or even the '80s, you're still better off going to the library and flipping through
microfiche (bet that's the first time THAT word's been used on MetaFilter). I hesitated blogging this story here until I saw how the
Internet History Timeline caught some people by surprise... Yes, even we MetaFilterers are sitting on the shoulders of Giants (and a few of us are old enough to remember "They Might Be Giants" as a
movie starring George C. Scott).
posted by wendell
on Jul 24, 2000 -
8 comments
