The distant echo of faraway voices

[venta]

When writing last week's BAYD post, I did what I always do: put up an mp3 (of Try This At Home) for download. Later on, when I wanted to refer in passing to Reasons Not To Be An Idiot, I just linked to YouTube.

And then I thought: why do I do that? Why don't I just link to YouTube for my BAYD posts? Unless it's something really quite obscure, it'll be there. Do people care that much about downloading an mp3?

And then I thought: er... good question. The answer surprised me. I first started BAYD as a regular thing at the beginning 2005. At that point, YouTube didn't exist.

The domain name wasn't registered until February 2005 (the first video was uploaded by one of the founders in April, it went into public beta in May and was officially launched in November).

I went to university in 1994; I remember in one of the interminable induction sessions someone asked if the college computer services included "e-mail". At the time, I didn't know what it was. But I had an email account by the end of the term.

My college's computers were text-only dumb terminals; my first experiences of the web were through Lynx. Recently, clearing out bags of old university paperwork I found a tiny scrap of paper. On it, in my friend Andrew's overly-neat, school-book writing, it said:

http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu

... he'd written it down for me, and explained the concept of a search engine, and suddenly I could find stuff. Admittedly, the stuff I could find was not always related to what I searched for, and was frequently porn, but stuff none the less.

The web of the mid-90s was an odd place, and achieving anything at all often felt like a miracle. But finding things was so exciting... finding other people with the same interests (there was, like, a whole mailing list of other people, all over the world, who liked New Model Army!) Finding odd, fascinating pages written by who-knew-who, finding MUDs and - even then - lost archives of long-dead conversations.

But by 2005? The world was a different place then. The internet was no longer a mysterious kingdom, but a well-mapped, mainstream area. We had Google[*], and FireFox, and Wikipedia... pretty much like it is now, right? Only without the annoying Flash and AJAX?

It really surprised me to find out that YouTube just wasn't an option. I link to it so frequently, without thinking, that it now seems faintly unimaginable that it arrived so late in the day.

By contrast, I'm surprised to find that Facebook was already around in 2005 (though I'm quite sure it hadn't impinged on my consciousness). I still think of Facebook and Twitter as the johnny-come-latelies of the web. Mind you, I also think of them as almost entirely dispensable :)

The BBC news site had a fascinating graph the other day, showing use of its services over time (with the x-axis marked with 'notable' events). They reckon UK internet use hit 30m in 2002 - so by 2005, well over half the country was online.

If I'd gone to university four years earlier, I might have graduated and moved on without really encountering the internet until it became un-ignorable. Four years later, and I'd have missed the party and perhaps never really known a Google-free online world.

[*] The day I first encountered Google (courtesy of bateleur) was a revelation. It just, like, found stuff. That was relevant. Quickly.

Comments

[uitlander]

I went to University in 1987. In February '89 I applied for a computing account as 'an undergraduate, for recreational purposes only'. On my first day in my current job, my predecessor put that form in front of me to see the look on my face. I currently work for the man who actually put the blank form in front of me in my College bar and said 'fill this out'.

I realised the power of the internet in 1989, when someone 'liveblogged' the LA earthquake on GROGGS, and spent the night reading their updates as the disaster unfolded. I saw the early internet before Lynx, and scoured usenet for FTP sites where I could download guitar tablature.

It's changed a bit since then.

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK, you win!

scoured usenet for FTP sites where I could download guitar tablature

Well, I did that too :) Which is odd, really, because I couldn't (and still can't) play guitar.

[uitlander]

Which is odd, really, because I couldn't (and still can't) play guitar.

Snap!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Correct, my subject line does indeed come from a song on Snap! (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snap-SE-2CD-Jam/dp/B000E8M1VE/) ;)

[lnr]

Which is still one of the best albums *ever*

[venta.livejournal.com]

Canonical driving music :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

*whistles through teeth* Now, dunno about that. Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever is arguably better. The Jam is more last-minute-homework-on-Sunday-night-after-Annie-Nightingale music... or to be more accurate now, loud-music-for-singing-along-while-doing-housework. :D

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

bah! -- it's a compilation, not a proper album. Unfair comparison ;-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm... so maybe my claim that had I gone to university in 1990 I might have missed the internet was a bit off, then. What do you reckon? How mainstream was this "wanting a computing account" business? Did many people fill out the forms, or did you have a particular requirement for an account?

[uitlander]

In Cambridge the majority of users were researchers/postgrads in the sciences. My friends, unsurprisingly, were geeks. If I wanted to arrange to go out for a drink things were tricky. There were no mobile phones, there was no point walking to their college and knocking on doors as they'd be in the (locked) college computer room. An account on Phoenix meant that "message ABC123 Drinkies?" would flash the word 'Drinkies?' across ABC123's screen, wherever they might be. This was clearly the way of the future.

I had no academic reason to get an account, I was a humanities student. I asked my predecessor why 'undergraduate for recreational purposes' existed. She said they had thought that some people might be curious want to come and play with no firm objective in mind. They thought this might be a good thing and open up horizons.

I arrived in Oxford in 1990. There was no such liberal access to the internet or University Computers. No network connection in either my College or my Dept. (which boasted a prototype iof the Tandy TRS80 as it's sole computer).

I spent much of my first term arguing with OUCS about whether I could be allowed an account on their systems. Their 'Gandalf Starmaster Vax Cluster' [I'm not making that up] was painfully inferior to Phoenix when I finally got access to the system. Nonetheless I arranged most of my research visits to Europe by email, got my supervisor an email account, and taught myself enough networking to set up a network in my Department before I left. When they finally found some money to appoint a Computer Officer there I applied for the job, having been the unpaid CO for a number of years. I didn't get short-listed, and had to teach the guy they appointed (who was a brilliant post-doc in need of a job) how to use a Computer before I left. Not that I'm in any way bitter about that you understand....

[venta.livejournal.com]

Gandalf Starmaster Vax Cluster

Wow, that's quite special :)

By the time I arrived, they'd got their finger out a bit and provided Sable, which worked pretty well (even though it was rumoured actually to be a small collections of 486s sellotaped together somewhere in OUCS). By the time I was in my third year, I had an ethernet connection in my college room (though I think that was pretty unusual).

Even then, though, I could never quite get it through to friends at other universities that it was no good emailing me pictures... "But you just click on the icon", they said. Since they simply couldn't believe that I operated a computer without a mouse - and I'd never even seen a Windows PC - we had no common ground.

I am impressed at your determination, though - networking has always defeated me completely.

[uitlander]

I am impressed at your determination, though - networking has always defeated me completely.

It was either that or walk down the Banbury Road to read my email. I am allergic to exercise, and have a note (I carefully forged) from my Mum excusing me from it under all circumstances:-)

They decomissioned the Vax to bring in Ermine and Sable. The established users and staff went onto ermine, which was higher spec IIRC and better looked after. The undergrads and newer postgrads were sent off to Sable, which had the nasty habit of falling over at inconvenient moments.

Last year I had the great pleasure of telling my counterpart in Oxford that she was wrong when she claimed that Oxford had never issued email addresses in the top level domain and had always sub-domained them. Being able to produce publications with my @ox.ac.uk address printed on them sealed the argument, although she maintained that she had been assured they had always been sub-domained. I remember the sub-domaining being brought in, as I had to fight a separate battle as a College funded postdoc to get myself put into the 'right' departmental sub-domain. I never actually used the sub-domain address.

OUCS have continued their awkwardness by insisting that I have my oxon.org address in the chch.oxon.org subdomain, rather the the queens.oxon.org subdomain where I think it belongs. Again, this means I don't use it.

But going back to your original point, I think OUCS would not have let an undergrad have access to anything pre-sable unless there was a very compelling reason (3rd year project type stuff). IIRC sable was set up to provide a previously absent student facility and boaden access.

[venta.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine recently did a one-year Masters in Oxford. She'd just finished her undergrad degree in York, where apparently there is one single log-in for all university computer systems. It is all beautifully integrated, and Just Works.

Apparently the disjointed systems offered by OUCS/her college/her department/etc came as a bit of a nasty surprise :)