[117073] in Cypherpunks
Shim, sham
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Thu Aug 26 01:09:30 1999
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 06:48:26 +0200 (CEST)
Message-Id: <199908260448.GAA31150@mail.replay.com>
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
At 04:42 PM 8/25/99 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>David Honig wrote:
>A friend of mine told me his GRANDFATHER got sick of Windblows 'cause it kept
>crashing, and he installed a Linux distribution from a Cd included in a
>magazine he saw at a stand. Worked fine for him.
I should like to meet him. Nerds are ageless. Kudos. Took me better part
of a week to fire up a BSD variant. Rusty old fart am I.
>> The point is: mass deployment and ease of use. TCP took off because W95
>> included a stack.
>
>Get yer timeline right: TCP/IP and the Web was available BEFORE win95. I was
>using Trumpet WinSocks on Win31 surfing with Mosaic. That was fun. :)
Sunder, you define yourself as a pocket-protector type, much like this
Honig character. I respect your
accomplishment; but realize you are atypically skilled.
I know the Protocol existed several D/A/D/ARPA iterations ago. I used
to wonder if I should learn Veronica, having learned Archie. But
*deployment* is what matters. Deployment requires
electric-starter-automatic-transmission ease of use, OK? Customers are
humans; humans are bubble-headed apes. Any questions?
(Hey, some of my best friends are humans..)
>Sure, loser95 brought more and more lusers to the Web, but back then everyone
>and their uncle were like "I want to get on the web" without know what the
>fuck the web was in the first place.
Yes but if they had to find and install and debug a shim, they were unusual.
Unusual is a positive adjective half the time. I mean it that way.
Again, if you had arranged IP for yourself in 93, you were studly.
Now, every hausfrau with a credit card has a link.
Whatever. Civilization is far too weird for any of us. Even the Cabal
hasn't a clue past 100 x what the weatherman can do.
Discontinuities happen.
Baby.
Always wear your seatbelt.
>IMHO, TCP isn't popular as most monkeys don't even have the slightest clue
>what the fuck it is. But, because it is required by browsers, it hides
itself
>in that whole package. A guy with a TV top webbox doesn't give a rats ass
>about TCP/IP, and this is as it should be. :)
Yep.
>> HTTP took off because a decerebrate monkey could browse. Ease of
>> use cannot be underestimated.
>
>A-Yup, but it wasn't HTTP that took off, no more than SMTP took off because
>people send email. No one uses HTTP/SMTP directly unless they telnet/netcat
>to port 80 directly, is writing browsers, clients, or servers. :)
Right on. Apps, not protocols. Dashboards, not engines.
Its -0001, folks. Interfaces matter. You need mathematical bones;
engineering muscle; but you won't replicate without beautiful skin.
Bits, transistors, wires, code, gummint velveeta is free. Will is expensive.
Gutenburg. Smith. Ford. Moore. Postel.
Steam engines were neat. Steam engines pulling trains were amazing.
Computers were neat. Computers networked were amazing.
Warning grunts are useful. The ability of a charistmatic speaker to fuck
with your head
is disastrous.
All the fucking rifles/typewriters/mimeographs in the world don't mean
anything if they're
only in the hands of the Cardinals. The Cardinals haven't won in how long?
-Blank Frank
cold as an iceberg
