Tag: internet

  • Brian Moriarty Listen

    Game designer Brian Moriarty delivered quite a talk at the 1997 Game Developers Conference, touching on everything from interaction design, emergent play, community-created art, creativity, self expression, and even an unexpected but interesting tangent about 101 Dalmatians. In hindsight, many of subjects he talks about would become evident over the next decade, from the Sims to Etsy to Minecraft to social networking. From Listen! The Potential of Shared Hallucinations:

    Before we can learn, before we can grow, we have to be prepared to listen.

    What does it mean, to listen?

    The word is commonly understood to mean “attentive hearing.”

    It has its etymological origin in the archaic verb, list.

    “List!” they used to say. “Ssh! List! The wild boar is outside!”

    But the verb “list” also means to tilt something to one side.

    When a sea vessel leans to starboard or port, it is said to be listing.

    So how did the word “list” turn into the verb “listen?”

    Because when we try to hear something, we sometimes cock our heads in the direction of the sound.

    So to listen means more than to hear attentively.

    The word also implies a change of inclination.

    A new slant.

    To listen is to put ourselves into a receptive attitude.

    A position to be re-aligned.

    Also worth reading (the talk is also available for watching as a video in the GDC Vault) if you fondly remember the days of Hypercard, MUDs, and when text adventures reigned supreme on AOL, or if you like crazy 1990s Photoshop anaglyphs…

  • Boston News on the Morris Worm

    [Video no longer available]

    A fun Boston nightly news clip from 1988 on the outbreak of the Morris worm, one of the first Internet-spreading infections that caught mainstream attention. There’s much to love about this clip: the “part-time virus hunter”, the scenes of MIT’s computer labs, the bizarre (but maybe slyly satirical?) footage of the infamous Atari 2600 ET game inserted, um, I guess to, uh, illustrate something computer-y?

    (Via Dangerous Minds)

  • Earliest Web Browsers

    Ars Technica has up a history article on the early web browsers, a rare glimpse into the largely-forgotten software that beat NCSA Mosaic to the punch but didn’t quite make it into pop culture consciousness (seen above is ViolaWWW, notable for early stabs at browsing history, bookmarks, styles, and even embedded scripting — probably also the first web browser I remember using on my Slackware copy of X Windows circa 1994! </old>).

    For all of the developments in web technology since 1991, it’s remarkable to see how many UI features and browsing concepts emerged almost immediately and are still with us today.

  • Nyan Cat Progress Bar for Windows

    Nyan Cat Progress Bar, replaces the standard Windows progress bars in Explorer. Oh, Internet!

    (Via Cal Henderson)

  • olduse.net Brings Back Usenet from 30 Years Ago

    Screenshot from an interesting project, olduse.net ― Usenet posts reappearing in realtime as they did exactly 30 years ago, a new way of experiencing the history of the early Net. See how things were mere months before the launch of B-News, long before the Great Renaming and the creation of the alt.* hierarchy, and best of all, the introduction of spam is more than a decade away still!

    You can use either the browser-based client to poke through the messages, or point your favorite NNTP client to the site and experience it as you would the real Usenet. Nice!

    Also, I like this answer from the FAQ:

    Can I post to olduse.net?
    Your posts will be accepted, but will not show up for at least 30 years. 🙂

    (Via Waxy Links)

  • Physicists break color barrier for sending, receiving photons

    To be filed under “research I like reading about even if I don’t quite understand how it works”, new studies from the University of Oregon into altering and controlling the color of light on the scale of individual photons in fiber optic signalling:

    In experiments led by Raymer’s doctoral student Hayden J. McGuinness, researchers used two lasers to create an intense burst of dual-color light, which when focused into the same optical fiber carrying a single photon of a distinct color causes that photon to change to a new color. This occurs through a process known as Bragg scattering, whereby a small amount of energy is exchanged between the laser light and the single photon, causing its color to change. […] 

    “In the first study, we worked with one photon at a time with two laser bursts to change the energy and color without using hydrogen molecules,” he said. “In the second study, we took advantage of vibrating molecules inside the fiber interacting with different light beams. This is a way of using one strong laser of a particular color and producing many colors, from blue to green to yellow to red to infrared.”

    The laser pulse used was 200 picoseconds long. A picosecond is one-trillionth of a second. Combining the produced light colors in such a fiber could create pulses 200,000 times shorter – a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second).

    (Via ACM TechNews)

  • Help Save a Piece of Usenet History at Duke University

    Duke’s OIT is taking down the Usenet service pioneered by its grad students in 1979, a supremely long-lived Internet resource that helped define modern communication (BBS’s, forums, and P2P software owe much to Usenet and the A news client). Another nail in the venerable medium’s slow, eventual decline.

  • Hito Steyerl: In Defense of the Poor Image

    Still from Ghosts Before Breakfast

    The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

    […]

    At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker’s film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

    – Excerpted from Hito Steyerl’s piece in e-flux journal #10

    (Via Rhizome)

  • This Creative Destruction Began in the 60s As

    This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. […] Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire. From Internet Antichrist, a thoughtful piece by David Byrne on the the development of the ARPANET, psychoacoustics research at Bell Labs leading to vocoders and Kraftwerk, the rise of digital recording and transmission, and the possibility of the near-future demise of physical media and risks to personal privacy. The market forces of creative destruction.
  • The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on

    “[…] gopher [was] an Edenic protocol of innocence (in comparison to HTML, the protocol of commerce and experience)”

    Ars Technica checks in on Gopher, the largely-forgotten pre-www protocol for getting information from servers in a simple, hypertext format. It’s out there still, just like the old BBSes, telnet MUDs / MOOs / MUSHes, Usenet, etc., and still useful in some contexts. Very few contexts, maybe – I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of Gopher pr0n or warez trading to give continued backwater life to the old medium, but hey, 4chan’s /b/ is available through Gopher

    What would things would be like if Gopherspace’s concision won out over HTTP’s ability to cram graphics and ads onto every resource? Sounds like our current mobile web app landscape.