On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, John Willis wrote: > I loved being able to do finger @host and then use talk to chat with other > people.
Me, too! That was a great feature. I'd finger '@' some server that my classmates used and then use talk or ytalk to figure out how to do our homework etc... People who didn't want to participate could just turn off talk requests. > IMNSHO, the real promise of the Internet as envisioned by Cerf, Postel, > et. al. was in the purity of the end-to-end networking connectivity, > where your personal machine is a node equal in stature to minis, mid, and > mainframes also participating: Well said. I feel the same way. First class servers talking with other first-class servers. This has been lost, now. If you want to "run a server" your ISP hears a cash register opening and you'll need a "business" account. It's so far away from the vision you describe well. > i.e., you have a real, meaningful address that can not only reach, but be > reached. It's so important. Most people didn't feel the loss, but guys like you and I won't let go of that vision so easily (for all the good it does us). However, they are *memories* now, and that's sad. It's like remembering a great oak circle in an old growth forest before they cut it down to put up condos and a Starbucks. Folks who live there love the Starbucks, and would recoil in horror at the idea of letting it all go... but we remember. > Of course, the prevalence of dial-up connectivity in those days somewhat > precluded this, but with a shell account, you could get close. Yes, exactly. "Back in the day" I felt like nothing would ever be "lost" on the Internet. As bandwidth and storage got cheap, I figured access would increase, not decrease. Now, I'm noticing that *plenty* of stuff is getting lost. I'll admit I even cringed when I saw Geocities dying. Yeah it was a cheesy service but, for example, I have a friend who is a master gunsmith and put all kinds of excellent info on a site he made. Now it's gone and you can't find that some of that info via a search anymore at all. That phenomenon seems to be picking up speed. It reminds me a bit of a book I read called "The Media Monopoly" by Ben Bagdikian. He talks about how even small towns used to have 2-3 newspapers with local news. Now they have none and the regional big-city paper only spouts syndicated news. So, I guess I was naive. More money and resources pouring into something don't mean better access to the "consumer". > Once broadband took off, with always-on connectivity, this should have > been mitigated--but alas, IPv4 depletion and that demonic invention called > NAT screwed it up all over again. I've often thought the same thing, but now I wonder. Is it NAT keeping everyone suppressed behind dynamic translation or is it more that 80% of the people on the net are just consuming media and since they don't clamor for equal "real" IP access, the ISPs simply don't care about that. > Of course, if class A and B address blocks weren't handed out like candy > to children in the early days, IPv4 might have lasted longer. But that's > a whole other discussion. I still hate Network Solutions and all the NICs for that, too. However, it was bound to happen one way or another. The math (internet population to ipv4 availability) doesn't work. So, I guess I should get over it. > IPv6 _should_ fix this, but trusting the telcos and tier 1 providers to > not screw up the transition is tantamount to an ardent belief in bigfoot, > the Loch Ness monster, and cold fusion. I used to give presentations on IPv6. My talk was very skeptical of the potential it promises and even more suspicious of all the QoS features that look awfully like what corporates want to make sure "free" content is basically slow and useless. I used to have a healthy dose of fear that IPv6 would make the situation a bit worse because of how ISPs would use the internal features. However, nowadays despite all kinds of pronouncements from Cisco and other network "geniuses" that "we have to do it! There is no choice! It's coming tomorrow. It's already widespread!" If I had a BS flag I'd throw it. The proof of their consummate failure to get IPv6 into any kind of widespread use is very evident to those who look. There is a discussion of this on Reddit that pretty well hits the mark. Even the pro-ipv6 folks say things like "Oh come on, I've been running it for years [dual stack] and we have 25% of our users on it already! It's not a failure" Oh Ohhhhhkhay. https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2w5u9o/biggest_failure_in_it_ipv6/ > IMO, bandwidth should be bandwidth: it's none of the ISP's business which > direction it goes in or what I'm using it for (as long as it's legal). Remember the old cry of "Information wants to be free!" ? It still rings true.... in the wilderness. > This is why I pay in excess of $300/month for a T1 line and a /27, as well > as ADSL with a /28 (from a local provider that doesn't care if I run > "servers" or not). I'd do the same thing if I wasn't such a tightwad or didn't have friends that did as you do who let me host with them. It's definitely very sub-optimal and expensive for no good reason. > I actually run a small neighborhood ISP that provides such a service Cool. Is it over wireless or how do you do it? > in that it's enthusiast-friendly, provides end-to-end connectivity, > provides shell accounts, a gopher server, a (text-only) USENET feed, has > finger and talk enabled on the various old servers (SunOS, HP-UX, Solaris, > 4.2BSD, etc.). Bless you sir. I wish I lived in your hood, then. > I also block video content, Facebook, and all the rather cancerous > bandwidth drains of the modern commercial Internet. Ha! Good! > I also miss: gopher, archie, veronica, and WAIS Yes! I used all those as well. I wasn't a big gopher user but I logged many hours with archie and veronica. I would mention ICB, but since IRC is still going strong, I certainly won't whine about that. I still celebrate the vitality of the current IRC nets. > The downward spiral after the commercialization of the Internet was > precipitous and alarmingly rapid: the vapidity of online exchanges quickly > reached fever pitch as more and more blockheads flooded the network. I agree, and it wasn't just individual blockheads, it was bad actors and corporations in a gold-rush mentality too. There was more than just an economic crash in 1999 it also represented a crashing of what the Internet had represented up to that point. It seems to be a process much like gentrification of a neighborhood. The same stuff has happened to some unnamed OS projects, too. The leader talks about minimalism and technical community in 1993 then flips a b**** and presides over massive mega-daemons running systems with binary logs and gobbling up as many small-is-beautiful services as possible. Heresy. > Prior to that, the sense of community and mutual trust was astonishing. *nod* Especially when you compare it to the present state of the art. I suppose if you were 19 you might point to social media and "interconnectedness" that comes from that. However, I really don't feel it when the corporate overlords run the services with the NSA breathing down our necks. The idea was to have a truly "peer to peer" system where the peers are first class citizens with equal access. > We didn't have to worry about security nearly as much, since most of us > were incredibly grateful to have access to such a resource in the first > place. Remember the "Morris Worm" ? That's a good example. Yeah, it was self-replicating code but it did.... nothing. Any negative side effect was just from the rapid spreading and system resources it took. Nowadays, folks create viruses that encrypt and/or destroy the target for ransom the minute they can write 3 lines of code in Visual Basic. The level of malice and thuggery have gone way up. > Yep. And the programming manual would come with (gasp) BIOS source > listings. ... and it opened up so many possibilities. Look at what that and a low price did for the C64. It's "scene" is still somewhat healthy with so many loyal fans. I never owned one and don't know that much about them, but I respect those folks. > kindergarten-level fold-out poster showing you where to plug in the > keyboard. ... or nothing but a notecard saying "Go online to http://kindergarten-crap-docs.com/hardly_anything for documentation!" I love the excuse, too. "It's better for the environment!" Ugh. > Even serious programming tools have more text in the license agreement > than they do in the printed docs. That's great news if you are a blood sucking lawyer. However, it's not so good if you want to use your compiler without fear or stepping on a legal landmine buried on page 31, subsection 8, paragraph 4. > Heh... I dropped out of college because of this trend. My so-called > "data structures" course was in reality just "Modula-2 Programming 101". I dropped out in my 4th year for the same reason. I got sick of listening to incompetant failures (with a few exceptions) talking about failed ideas and failed languages while I watched my friends making 6x the income with no degree or training at all (late 90s). It was time to strike while the iron was hot. I work with people who had great academic experiences, but then again they went to good schools - some of the same ones I was accepted to but wasn't willing to rack up 250k in debt to attend. I don't talk to anyone over 50 about college/uni - most of them have no idea what it's like now and spout establishment BS. Only my younger friends and younger brothers understand this I talked my brothers out of philosophy and history majors into ChemE. They graduate next year and they may be the only ones amoung their classmates finding jobs, too (according to them, not me). > I found that I was better served by buying old textbooks and studying on > my own time, and getting mentored by seasoned veterans. Same here. I do some woodworking and when I go to classes, say to learn dovetailing, the #1 thing I come away glad to have learned was the tips and tricks from the guys who've already mastered it. Plus, when you sit down and read a text book or manual, you aren't doing it to pass a test - you are doing it to master the material. I found out to my sorrow that those aren't the same things. So, now I focus only on the latter. > Very true. Trumpet Winsock was an exercise in frustration: but I got > turned on to UNIX very early on. Fortunately, so did I. I guess we do catch some breaks in life :-) Thank goodness for the BSDs, or I'd be even more cynical. There is some good left on the net, but it's sadly not in the same places anymore, and I now know there is no guarantee anything will go on untarnished forever. That's just a process of maturing, I suppose. Thanks for that post. Very cathartic. Glad I'm not the only one. :-) -Swift
