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The Desert of Network
Jun. 6th, 2023 11:24 amCirca 1989-1991 or so I was helping to run the Open Computing Facility (OCF), a set of networked Apollo workstations on the UC Berkeley campus that gave access to the nascent internet.
If the timeline isn't obvious to you, this was the internet half-a-decade before it became commercially available, where most people just had access to BBSes and fairly new services like AOL and GEnie. AOL wouldn't have an internet portal for a few more years. GEnie might have at the time (or if not, within a year or two). The point is: access to the internet was rare and hard to come by, and I think most of it imagined it would always be that way, not foreseeing how things would open up in the '90s.
So the crux of the story after that laborious set up is that we kicked some guy off the OCF. I don't remember who he was, though some old Cal alumni might remind me. I don't remember what he did, though it was surely "being a jerk" in some form or another.
And he sent us a miserable message about how we'd thrown him into the "desert of network", because obviously he thought he was never going to get back onto the legendary internet again, with its ability to communicate with people across the world (as long as they were at universities, mostly) and perhaps most importantly play netrek and nethack.
Ah, how things have changed, oh social media that is destroying our democracy and AIs that are destroying our creativity, none of which would have been possible without a widely accessible networked set of worldwide computers.
And we have just half-an-hour or so before we have to vacate our hotel room, with no real indication of when we need to be at the vet to (hopefully) pick up Lucy and bring her home. (They think she's having some inflammation of her liver, based on a call last night, but I'm hoping to get that firmly nailed down with the verification of the morning doctor before I write it all up. So, tonight or tomorrow.)
Which made me think about being cast out into the desert to wander aimlessly until we alight back at the Vet Emergency Clinic, hence this story.
If the timeline isn't obvious to you, this was the internet half-a-decade before it became commercially available, where most people just had access to BBSes and fairly new services like AOL and GEnie. AOL wouldn't have an internet portal for a few more years. GEnie might have at the time (or if not, within a year or two). The point is: access to the internet was rare and hard to come by, and I think most of it imagined it would always be that way, not foreseeing how things would open up in the '90s.
So the crux of the story after that laborious set up is that we kicked some guy off the OCF. I don't remember who he was, though some old Cal alumni might remind me. I don't remember what he did, though it was surely "being a jerk" in some form or another.
And he sent us a miserable message about how we'd thrown him into the "desert of network", because obviously he thought he was never going to get back onto the legendary internet again, with its ability to communicate with people across the world (as long as they were at universities, mostly) and perhaps most importantly play netrek and nethack.
Ah, how things have changed, oh social media that is destroying our democracy and AIs that are destroying our creativity, none of which would have been possible without a widely accessible networked set of worldwide computers.
And we have just half-an-hour or so before we have to vacate our hotel room, with no real indication of when we need to be at the vet to (hopefully) pick up Lucy and bring her home. (They think she's having some inflammation of her liver, based on a call last night, but I'm hoping to get that firmly nailed down with the verification of the morning doctor before I write it all up. So, tonight or tomorrow.)
Which made me think about being cast out into the desert to wander aimlessly until we alight back at the Vet Emergency Clinic, hence this story.