Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.
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@HardwareGeek like 300 baud on an msx2? Although we used that as a minitel (?) interface, not realish internet imo.
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@robo2 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@HardwareGeek like 300 baud on an msx2? Although we used that as a minitel (?) interface, not realish internet imo.
Minitel wasn’t the Internet but a completely separate thing, mainly used in France (where it originated) and a few other places. In some ways, far ahead of its time; in others, the tech just wasn’t up to it yet for general adoption, I think.
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@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@xaade
So snail mail is no conversation either? Stop this bullshit. There are several ways of communicating. You should choose the right one for the job. E-mail has it's place. And so does reply all.
E-mail has a formal component lacking in many other digital communication forms. I need that. I need the written consent that I'm connecting to a customer's system to investigate or fix something. Or what the fuck we discussed over the phone. It's asynchronous and that means the the recipient is in control of the timing. You'll get a reply on my timing, not on yours. This is not a negative thing, stop wanting stuff immediately.I fail to see how you've said something opposite of me.
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
it's not what a conversation is
This post is exactly what I mean.
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@Gurth said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Filed under: who remembers BITNET?
I do. I never actually consciously used it, but my first exposure to the Internet was joining a mailing list that advertised both a BITNET and an Internet e-mail address.
Never used BITNET, but one of our local BBSes was on FidoNet. Fun times. :)
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@Parody That seems like a dog of a communication system.
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@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Email is totally a mechanism that stores the messages for a while during the process of sending, including on intermediate servers.
I highlighted the key difference IMO, as this makes the storage transient by nature. Once the email is received, all intermediate copies can be removed, so the overall storage requirements (in particular for an intermediate server that is in no way related to sender or receiver) is limited. That doesn't apply to Usenet.
Fortunately, all the really crappy EBCDIC servers seem to have been retired.
My point was that Usenet was IMO extraordinarily slow at evolving, even when there was a clear need (using more than ASCII) and a clear solution (UTF) and a clear implementation (all servers/clients had options to support it). Switching to UTF should have been a no-brainer, especially in the later years when bandwidth was less of an issue (i.e. the argument of "UTF takes 2x space" wasn't really relevant anymore), and yet it took... I would say probably literally a decade or more, which is huge.
Obviously that was more a human problem than a technical one, so in theory a new generation of admins could have changed that, but in practice, that resistance to change contributed to killing it.
Which is one of the things I mentioned earlier, that Usenet totally failed to do properly and that is now an essential feature. There was no effective way of policing stuff, either to prevent illicit content or to limit bandwidth.
Policing was always on a local basis. How else do you think a system distributed across large numbers of jurisdictions is going to work? There isn't a central authority.
Yes, that is exactly my point. What made the initial strength of Usenet (the decentralisation) turned out to be a key weakness later on (and would still be nowadays where all the talk is about content policing). You may regret the turn that online discussions, and discussions about online discussions, have taken, but that won't make it any different.
The only real problem it has now is that so many people have gone elsewhere.
"This communication system works perfectly excepted that no-one communicates with it" isn't a glowing endorsement. For all intensive dolphins, it's dead and no longer suited to online discussions.
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@Parody said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Never used BITNET, but one of our local BBSes was on FidoNet. Fun times. :)
Ah, yes, FidoNet … I was too young to really have used that myself, but I know my father used to use BBSes connected to it.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Parody That seems like a dog of a communication system.
__ / \ /|oo \ (_| /_) _`@/_ \ _ | | \ \\ | (*) | \ )) ______ |__U__| / \// / FIDO \ _//|| _\ / (________) (_/(_|(____/ (c) John Madil
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@Parody said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gurth said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@dkf said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Filed under: who remembers BITNET?
I do. I never actually consciously used it, but my first exposure to the Internet was joining a mailing list that advertised both a BITNET and an Internet e-mail address.
Never used BITNET, but one of our local BBSes was on FidoNet. Fun times. :)
My local FidoNet BBS provided a Usenet-to-Fido gateway.
Every night I automatically downloaded all newsgroups of interest, and the next night uploaded my posts. With my superfast 2400 bps modem. ;-)
Still used the Fido gateway after I finally got "real" internet around 1988-1989, mainly because I had to use either a dial-up connection, or had to be physically at the university to access it.
