Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: The Web

Steve Barnes

Fri, 05 Sept 2014 00:07:24 +1200

Gah, read “two or more networks” above. On tablet in bed atm editing features are hopeless.

Yup, 5 months down the track and edit functions on tablets are still crap.
Nothing happens under a National Govt.

Steve Barnes

Fri, 05 Sept 2014 00:04:54 +1200

CQ… CQ…
Hey, five months late but....
That came from ... "seek you", simple effective communication. Sadly lacking these days.

Steve Barnes

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 16:44:25 +1300

This I totally agree with.
What has happened, I think, is that someone at the White House has said “We need a good news story about the Internet!”, but this in no way counters the harm the NSA has done, technically and spiritually, to the Internet protocols and technologies by…

BenWilson

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:17:41 +1300

Gah, read "two or more networks" above. On tablet in bed atm editing features are hopeless.

BenWilson

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:02:19 +1300

Anyone vaguely techy these days can distinguish The Internet from The Web. But "little i" internets are lesser spoken of these days and they definitely existed before 1980, and continued well after then. IPX/SPX was a common internet protocol even in the 90s. It was just mostly on Novell networks,…

Ian Dalziel

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:01:21 +1300

a sleepy little Ham net...
We all thought we were pretty connected back in the third form at Cashmere High Radio Club ... CQ... CQ... (mid '70s)
... and we could toast our sandwiches at lunchtime!

Lindsay Vette

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:32:06 +1300

Yes, communication before tcp/ip was proprietary and convoluted, and applications like Usenet were only recently established anyway.

When I joined DEC they had a corporate network (not tcp/ip) that enabled email and a forum like application amongst other network facilities with links to the internet for things like Usenet etc.…

nzlemming

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 15:33:41 +1300

Is this good news?
In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

More a case of the Americans trying to put the best spin on a situation that was moving out of their direct control, anyway.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United…

Steve Barnes

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:01:29 +1300

I’m an old geek and to me the Internet is the underlying infrastructure that’s been around since I was in primary school in the 60s.
You went to primary at MIT?
Joking of course but "The Internet" is younger than you think I suspect, The World Wide Web, even younger...…

Russell Brown

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:52:04 +1300

I always laugh a bit when people talk about the internet starting with Tim Berners-Lee. I’m an old geek and to me the Internet is the underlying infrastructure that’s been around since I was in primary school in the 60s. I

Strictly speaking, you'd have to say the real internet…

Thrash Cardiom

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 07:29:01 +1300

Pipped me by a couple of years. I have 16 year old email address on my own domain.

Lindsay Vette

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 19:40:16 +1300

I always laugh a bit when people talk about the internet starting with Tim Berners-Lee. I'm an old geek and to me the Internet is the underlying infrastructure that's been around since I was in primary school in the 60s. I have used email, Usenet, BBS type discussion boards and…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 14:52:12 +1300

Is this good news?
In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone
The new change is in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil and other nations have fumed at revelations of American spying on its…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:39:43 +1300

Neal Stephenson’s SnowcrashPublication date June 1992
That man could see into the future with a clarity matched only by the NSA's spying network...
The story begins in Los Angeles in the unspecified future, no longer part of the United States. The federal government of the United States has…

Chris Lipscombe

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 11:59:40 +1300

Brisbane-based Digital Video Productions — acquired by Telecom as part of their ill-fated PacStar purchase — was contracted to produce the first Xtra site. Being mostly developers of interactive training materials on CD-i, they went for a home page that at something like 200KB took an age to load over…

Steve Barnes

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:32:46 +1300

Everybody on Facebook and that ain't everybody.
I, for one, refuse to bare my soul to a sole assole.
;-)

Geoff Lealand

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:27:54 +1300

My university email is more than 24 years old and still works well--except for the irritating requirement to change my password every 90 days.

Chris Waugh

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:17:26 +1300

So. Nothing to see here, move along.

Of course the hacking is not indiscriminate. They're deliberately targeting everybody.

Steve Barnes

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:01:45 +1300

Apparently, we are all just a little bit paranoid...
NSA says “indiscriminate” Facebook hacking allegations “are simply false”
So. Nothing to see here, move along.

Sacha

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:58:31 +1300

yes, one of us is being a bitch

Kyle Matthews

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:54:11 +1300

Here we are. A rare surviving screenshot of x-Ville. I’ve looked for this image several times and this little gif is all there was.

Christ. Serious flashbacks, and I never used Xtra.

Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address?

21 years in a few months.…

Steve Barnes

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:41:05 +1300

While we’re on the subject of how secure we feel….
How about these apples? or any other make of device for that matter…
NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world
With Turbine, no humans are required to exploit phones, PCs, routers, VPNs.
Turbine is part…

Steve Barnes

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:30:50 +1300

Superbly illustrated Sacha ;-)

Sacha

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 11:25:27 +1300

vicious knitting circles

meow

kiwicmc

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 09:24:34 +1300

There's a complex Venn diagram to be produced describing Public Address readers. IT nerds, geeks of a various persuasions, unreconstructed lefties, musicologists, travellers, possibly Graeme Edgeler sitting in a circle all of his own...

Ian Dalziel

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 09:10:29 +1300

all god's chilun got algae riddim...
meet the simplex algorithm*
YOU MIGHT not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the…

nzlemming

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:41:03 +1300

I am really quite surprised, if not astounded, that this thread has received so little response

I've been busy, mmmkay?

nzlemming

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:35:51 +1300

How about a shout out for Lou Montulli, one of the developers of Lynx, a text only web browser released in 1992 and still in use. I used it for years after Netscape became available if I was on a slow connection. Lynx was developed by students at the University…

nzlemming

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:31:25 +1300

Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address? Even more scary, I’ve never deleted a non-spam message or disposable notification.

I've had my current email address (not the Gmail one – my real email address) since 1995. And its domain name. Never really bothered with a…

nzlemming

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:28:04 +1300

www.govt.nz in 1996

Managed by Colin Jackson and coded (IIRC) by one Nat Torkington.

I didn't take it over until 2000, by which time it had become a PHP/MySQL based beast known as NZGO.

Steve Barnes

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:58:24 +1300

My memory is that most search engines had caved in to this practice and thus were becoming less and less useful.

Not only did Google not cave in but actively worked in the opposite direction. Back in 2010 they gave us "Caffine"
Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:54:30 +1300

Ask Jeeves was pretty good until they started ranking paid-links ahead of the links one might be looking for. Several search engines went that way.

My memory is that most search engines had caved in to this practice and thus were becoming less and less useful.

Google resisted and was…

Steve Barnes

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:28:30 +1300

In one of my earlier posts I touched on how “those evil hackers” actually had a great deal to do with the development of the web and computers in general and how that has changed with time.
Tim Berners Lee has this to say.

Speaking with The Guardian…

Steve Withers

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:00:33 +1300

Ask Jeeves was pretty good until they started ranking paid-links ahead of the links one might be looking for. Several search engines went that way. Google resisted and was then able to persist. Certainly this is why I kept using Google. They provided results we wanted. But now they only…

Steve Barnes

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:56:59 +1300

A bit of reminiscing from Russ at the Australia New Zealand Internet Awards on the evening of Tuesday, September 17 in Wellington
From... nz.general: a speech
....websites created by individuals like Bruce Simpson, Rob Cawte and Mark Profitt. The latter two published the text of my weekly radio…

Steve Barnes

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:06:26 +1300

I am really quite surprised, if not astounded, that this thread has received so little response. In light of the fact that Russell cut his MSM teeth on this very subject, Computers and Internet, in the Listener magazine, in fact he won an award for the column in…

Steve Barnes

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 18:58:22 +1300

The Wold Wide Web – The dark dark side

Communications security has held my curiosity since the days of Captain Crunch and other members of the Phone Preaking community, among whom was a chap who went by the handle of Oaf Tobark aka Steve…

BenWilson

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:24:52 +1300

I think I may have composed a mail in EMacs. Once. The Linux nuts loved going on about how user friendly it was, and I could only scratch my head when comparing it with a GUI mail client. They were speaking from a world where access to a mainframe was…

izogi

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:48:43 +1300

I’d rather actually talk to someone in the building than struggle with Emacs in a command line

You used EMacs as a mail reader??

Actually, yeah. Knowing EMacs I could believe that.

Russell Brown

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 07:32:18 +1300

Pew has posted a nice Web timeline. I remember a lot of this stuff.

Steve Barnes

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:47:22 +1300

Ok, back to
Back in the Day from TVNZ.
Back in the Day: Introducing the Internet
Interesting that the XTRA sponsored program was using Netscape rather than Internet Explorer, guess that was to placate those pesky Macintosh users. ;-)

sandra

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:48:01 +1300

I really got excited about the internet while living in Lebanon from 1998 – I could either go to the British Council library to research stuff in their reference section, or try and find it on the 'net. The latter was often more convenient, although a year later reliable electricity…

sandra

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:43:26 +1300

In the early 1990s (90-92) I used the term "virtual reality" in conversation with my husband and was mocked, if not scoffed at! (I'd read a Time magazine article and had discussed it with my boss, who, despite being apparently ancient, was pretty clued up on evolving technology.)
So I…

Ian Dalziel

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:49:18 +1300

Speaking of hyper text
BBC releases 30th Anniversary Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game

and IIRC The Residents ended up here on their 13th Anniversary Tour in '86, due to them being impressed that someone in NZ had email...
(or something like that)

Richard Aston

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:36:59 +1300

I actually walked into their old bunker on Newton Road a couple of days after they’d announced it as the Tuanz conference, found Nick Wood surrounded by modem banks and signed up.

I did exactly the same thing in, 1995 I think, modem banks sounds flash what I remember was…

Samuel Scott

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 20:29:58 +1300

Ah such fond memories of our 486, Alta Vista….the family email address we all shared and used for nothing more than emailing Grandad. Learning how to clear your browser history (so important for a teenager). It seemed like I had no idea what the internet was in 1994 and was…

ange wither

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 18:52:42 +1300

and heres a screen shot of the old e-world, to show where XTRA got the idea from:

kiwicmc

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 18:51:42 +1300

While I'm in the granddad mood.

First email 1985 (uucp): plexusuk!chris
Second 1990 (CompuServe): 100242,1003
Third 199? (Internet):
Fourth ???? (Free):
Last 1998 (Own domain):

Stephen R

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:14:49 +1300

...and Windows XP comes off life support soon too

http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/04/technology/security/atm-windows-xp/

An estimated 95% of American bank ATMs run on Windows XP, and Microsoft is killing off tech support for that operating system on April 8. That means Microsoft will no longer issue security updates to patch holes in Windows XP,…

Stephen Judd

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:21:57 +1300

Rex Croft must have registered vital.org.nz for me around 1998, so I've had my site, email address etc for at least that long. /namedrop

BenWilson

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:38:52 +1300

I registered taniwha.com back in 1993 so my email address is ~21 years old

Could be a winner. I had email in 1991, they were standard issue in Computer Science. I had to learn Unix commands to access it, and could not, for the life of me at the time,…

Russell Brown

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:07:40 +1300

It’s interesting the way NZ went. In the UK dial-up access was typically through a revenue shared standard rate call (0870 number ISTR) such that the ISP got per-minute revenue.

Whereas we always had free local calling. The big ISPs here did kick off by charging $5-$6/hour for access, but…

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 11:46:55 +1300

game-changing monthly flat-rate account

It's interesting the way NZ went. In the UK dial-up access was typically through a revenue shared standard rate call (0870 number ISTR) such that the ISP got per-minute revenue. Often you didn't even have to sign up, and there were services where you could start…

Ian Dalziel

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 11:22:26 +1300

...and Windows XP comes off life support soon too

Russell Brown

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:52:06 +1300

Yep:

The word is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in…

Gareth Ward

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:38:04 +1300

Presumably Google must've learnt from Jeeves and their ilks' mistakes and the rest is history.

I believe the answer to that is PageRank* – Google's original algorithm for search ranking. To follow up Russell's point re the academic origins of the web, I understand that the PageRank patent is Stanford's,…

Russell Brown

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:34:25 +1300

yep – I still have my original Ihug address ( and others of course) that I realise is also 18 years old

I abandoned my old ihug address — which had become something of a spamtrap anyway — when I departed ihug. It was a little bit of a moment,…

JWT1

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:25:43 +1300

Jean Hughes

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 08:44:38 +1300

Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address?
yep – I still have my original Ihug address ( and others of course) that I realise is also 18 years old

Chris Lipscombe

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 08:09:49 +1300

I might have some XTRA screen grabs in my files. All archived on 3.5" floppies — but I do have an external USB drive that I can use to access the files. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Chris Lipscombe

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 08:02:23 +1300

Speaking of intellectual origins of the Web... does anyone remember Xanadu? I've always thought Ted Nelson's idea of non-sequential writing, first developed in the 1960s, was an interesting alternative to Tim Berners-Lee's work on one-way hypertext links. I heard Ted Nelson speak in 1991 at the Digital Equipment Computer Users…

Andre Alessi

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:09:01 +1300

Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have been documenting each cached GeoCities page via a Tumblr and a rather whimsical blog. It's startling to see the ways the web has changed (four-frame GIFs!) and the ways in which it hasn't ("This is my Def Leppard fan page!"]]

Paul Campbell

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:06:29 +1300

I got my domain in mid-1995 so my email address is 18 and a half.

I registered taniwha.com back in 1993 so my email address is ~21 years old – but I used uucp before that the same machine had served me as ..!taniwha!paul since about 1989

Jackie Clark

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:15:35 +1300

My personal experience of the Internet began in 1994, I believe. Ian had a computer on which he played war games, and I was very disparaging. "I'd rather read a book" I opined. And then he came home with this thing, called the Internet and had us linked up with…

Rich Lock

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 01:44:12 +1300

Is that like Google’s way of saying “learn to use a search engine, Granddad!”

Well, the last time I did it, it was 'how do I fill in a paying-in slip?'. Which would be embarrassing, but over the course of ten years in NZ, I don't think I ever paid…

Simon Lyall

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:11:35 +1300

Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address?

Hotmail wasn't founded till mid-1996 so your email address probably isn't quite 18.

I got my domain in mid-1995 so my email address is 18 and a half.

However there are people at Waikato University that have had…

BenWilson

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:08:31 +1300

It’s the mullet of communication. All business in the front, long at the back when it’s time to par-tay.

On my 18 year old address I totally "live in the now".

Hebe

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:02:12 +1300

[The fax of course is not internet; but to a non-techie type like myself, it was almost as glamorous and came in that same bracket as email: instant access to overseas.]

Rich Lock

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 23:40:01 +1300

Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address?

One 15-year old and one 13-year old Hotmail address, still in use. Plus two Gmail accounts, and a domain/server-based 'proper' address. I'd have killed off the older ones, but given how easy it is these day to route…

BenWilson

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 23:35:44 +1300

the first results are ‘ask.com’.

Is that like Google's way of saying "learn to use a search engine, Granddad!"

Rich Lock

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 23:32:39 +1300

the big point-of-difference with Ask Jeeves being that it let people type in questions, instead of search terms.

That's how it was sold, but it quickly became a standing joke, because even if it 'knew' the answer to a particular question (and usually it didn't), it wasn't 'intelligent' enough to…

BenWilson

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 23:26:26 +1300

One thing has remained constant through decades of change. My hotmail address. Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address? Even more scary, I've never deleted a non-spam message or disposable notification.

It's actually quite a sucky service. But I'm sentimental about it now. It's like…

Hebe

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:57:41 +1300

I love Firefox: it's straightforward; and I don't see an advantage in being over-Googled. google search is great and the maps.

My first intersection with the internet was in 1995 or 1996 at an INL newspaper. I was specifically instructed that editorial staff access was locked down so journalists couldn't…

Russell Brown

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:43:39 +1300

www.govt.nz in 1996.

Russell Brown

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:42:27 +1300

Here we are. A rare surviving screenshot of x-Ville. I've looked for this image several times and this little gif is all there was.

Russell Brown

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:38:04 +1300

that took me back to “e-world”, an apple based alternative to AOL (simulation here http://www.remember-eworld.de). It was exciting hearing the gardle doodle thwang thwang of the modem, and into an online community. I used to facilitate feminist and queer conversations in women online worldwide (WOW), met some lovely people. Not…

Don Christie

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:00:34 +1300

then moved fairly quickly to Planet Nelson run by the anarchic and lovely Chris O'Donoghue.

This was just worth repeating.

Craig Ranapia

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 20:53:17 +1300

The news media came to believe that being underwritten by advertising was a birthright, and it wasn’t. The phenomenon that sees The Guardian, a paper with around 200,000 readers in print, reach an internet audience of 36 million is the same that sees The Guardian burn up its trust account…

ange wither

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 20:43:07 +1300

that took me back to "e-world", an apple based alternative to AOL (simulation here http://www.remember-eworld.de). It was exciting hearing the gardle doodle thwang thwang of the modem, and into an online community. I used to facilitate feminist and queer conversations in women online worldwide (WOW), met some lovely people. Not…

kiwicmc

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 19:47:17 +1300

http://web.archive.org/web/19981111185814/http://ourphotos.com/

Now I remember, my sister's kiwi wedding at some winery out Kumeu way was deemed not acceptable to the US audience (so us geeks thought anyway), so we substituted with something suitably more up market.

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 19:03:58 +1300

Had to go look, erm,, forgot my password ;-)
Seems it is still connected to a server somewhere.
I still regard myself as being somewhat “web savvy” but can’t for the life of me understand Facebook or how the hell it can be worth billions. Guess there is “One born…

kiwicmc

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:09:29 +1300

I also came up with many cunning plans – ourphotos.com was one. What you would do is post (yes – post) your photos (yes! photos) to us, we'd scan them in and make a web page for you. The hand crafted HTML was a true work of art that almost…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:38:39 +1300

Now where were we? ah yes, the World Wide Web.
I wondered at the time if there was a way of making money out of this new fangled device, I scoured my planet sized brain for a cunning plan, I came up blank. If you were to set up a…

Greg Dawson

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:11:41 +1300

There’s something wrong with my wife and I searching the same term in google and getting different results

You can turn that off – go into settings on the google search homepage, turn off search history. It's not easy to find, but it's there.

Sofie Bribiesca

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:44:09 +1300

Michelle Hacker… a very helpful news video researcher. She was running NVR when last I darkened the threshold of the Starship Enterprise.

My BFF :)

Phil Wallington

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:20:01 +1300

Michelle Hacker... a very helpful news video researcher. She was running NVR when last I darkened the threshold of the Starship Enterprise.

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:00:35 +1300

Ooops. That link to TVNZ Back in the Day was a bit wrong, took you to page 7 of a search.
Here's a better one.
TVNZ Back in the Day
Still think TVNZ should make this easier to find.

Andre Alessi

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:52:49 +1300

I don't think I realised the significance of this at the time, but my first experience on the internet was the result of a brief foray into journalism in 1995 or 1996. I had been hired by an indie radio station in Gisborne to be "news manager", responsible for the…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:47:57 +1300

There's something wrong with my wife and I searching the same term in google and getting different results.

Yeah, that harks back to my point about the "hand holding" its getting a bit creepy.

Rob Stowell

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:37:25 +1300

Early searches – I found Lycos the best (of a fairly bad lot) but like everyone, abandoned it fast when google arrived (I remember reading a NYer article about it, thinking – what a brilliant idea! – and pretty much never using another search engine.)
Now- like izogi, I'm beginning…

Dave Patrick

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:30:34 +1300

I signed up to iHug’s original “all you can download” dial-up plan in about 1995 (my now-Vodafone account number is so low I always have to repeat it when I ring customer service) – back when Mirsky’s Worst of the Web was relevant, because you could almost keep up with…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:29:09 +1300

Just checking TVNZ Back in the Day to see what they have on WWW, nothing yet but I have Ms M. A. Hacker (great Name eh?) looking for what TVNZ has.
Did find this gem though Hi Tech Video, 1988

Rob Stowell

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:28:04 +1300

Remarkable in hindsight that Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984. Like most readers I had no idea hyperlinks would so quickly go from fiction to reality to banality.
We joined PlaNet Canterbury in late 1994, which seems almost pioneering, except they'd been around since '93 I think. Browsing in Netscape,…

Brent Jackson

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:27:54 +1300

I remember when Alta Vista came out (or I discovered it), and suddenly searching the internet became so much easier. Google was of course, another step up, but recently I've been finding Google much less useful for the sort or searches that I am doing. It doesn't look like DuckDuckGo…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:54:06 +1300

the original ACTRIX sitting in the corner of the dining room!!!!

They are still going too.
And my first email address having to be 8 letters or less.
Yup, I used my car registration number, more hxr like ;-)

bob daktari

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:38:38 +1300

Its funny but when I think back to my early experiences with the net in 1995 I don't feel much nostalgia, yet I do with music etc .

I do feel a nostalgia for pre internet times – when the world was huge and complex and it just doesn't feel…

Ross Mason

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:37:58 +1300

Heh. One of the first lessons I learnt about getting information from the “web” – before the web existed – when using Veronica, Archie, Gopher (etc) was to write something that was nearly right and include a “silly error”. Talk about elicit a storm of “silly bugger” responses. It were…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:17:59 +1300

Can’t remember dates as such but I do remember my first BBS experience, it was like WOW, my mind raced with possibilities, “I wonder if you could use this for digital music via file sharing?” (you could, and still can, download music as a .txt file and, although I can’t…

izogi

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:52:52 +1300

But when google came along it was a seismic shift in searching.

...And now it doesn't just mine data about websites people might want to read, it mines data about its users.

It's a bit weird how stuff changes. I've recently switched from Chrome back to Firefox/Iceweasel because I became…

Richard Aston

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:46:19 +1300

Its funny but when I think back to my early experiences with the net in 1995 I don't feel much nostalgia, yet I do with music etc .
It got better so fast that the past was so slow in comparison why would I feel anything but relief it had…

Richard Aston

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:34:05 +1300

Lame! Not really a search engine and certainly not as good as Alta Vista, which was already in wide use at the time.

Agreed, webcrawler was ok too , Yahoo for a while until it couldn't keep up with new sites. But when google came along it was a seismic…

Ross Bell

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:33:51 +1300

And the first thing to be sold online was? weed

Robyn Gallagher

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:30:11 +1300

Speaking of ye olde search engines, when I started at Xtra in 1999, there was a page I had to maintain on the Xtra website that was a list of search engines that people could use, including one for New Zealand sites.

Anyway, this anniversary is a good a time…

izogi

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:05:16 +1300

Maybe I only saw one side of it, but I remember the big point-of-difference with Ask Jeeves being that it let people type in questions, instead of search terms. It was meant to be more naturally usable, and therefore become extremely popular to sell more advertising, or something.

I don’t…

Rich of Observationz

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:46:37 +1300

Ask Jeeves is now ask.com

Raymond A Francis

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:42:48 +1300

It is great to look back and discern how our lives have been changed
Ask Jeeves was one of my list of search engines although hardly the best
It will be interesting to see where it all goes but jeeze there have been some changes when you compare my Amstrad…

Russell Brown

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:19:35 +1300

I remember in about ’96 or ’97, in their “what’s hot / what’s not” column (or whatever it was called) Metro rated as hot “Ask Jeeves – the search engine with grunt”.

Lame! Not really a search engine and certainly not as good as Alta Vista, which was already in…

Peter Darlington

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:01:38 +1300

I was just thinking about this the other day. It would have been May 1994 when I hooked up the first public library computer in the Nelson/Tasman region to the Internet. We used Telecom Learning Link (remember that?) initially and then moved fairly quickly to Planet Nelson run by the…

Grant McDougall

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:56:52 +1300

Google arrived as not only a better search engine (and search engines really were fairly rubbish until it did), but one that prioritised results according to the links we’d made ourselves.

I remember in about '96 or '97, in their "what's hot / what's not" column (or whatever it was…

Public Address

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:56:52 +1300

Discussion from blog post.