walled-gardens-part-1.md 3.4 KB
+++ title = "40 years of walled gardens & open platforms: Part I" author = ["George M Jones"] publishDate = 2020-08-18 lastmod = 2023-12-06T05:46:39-05:00 tags = ["history", "computing", "social", "USENET", "Facebook", "Twitter"] categories = ["blog"] draft = false +++
This the first in a series of articles where I do a brain dump pf something like 40 years experience with "social media" of various forms: Dial-up BBSs, Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, CompuServe, AOL, Slashdot, Sourceforge, blogspot, Facebook, Jabber, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastadon "...we didn't start the fire (flame-war?)..." OK, maybe we did.
I hope this is useful, or at least interesting. It may wind up just being a mix of introspection, hubris or narcissism, it may be part of working up the nerve to quit Twitter as I quit Facebook in 2016, maybe I'll even work up the nerve to go cold turkey as tychi is doing.
{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/rs232.jpg" caption="Figure 1: RS-232 pin-outs" >}}
Post 20 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
1 Before my time {#before-my-time}
To being with, we need to set the stage. We're here. Now. How did we get here? What went before? Understanding these might help us both to live in the world as we find it and figure out how to move forward.
'- - - ... - - -' : Yesterday, <2020-08-16 Sun> was the 100th
anniversary of the first trans-Atlantic telegram:
<https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/educate/bytes/this_day_in_history_calendar.html/event/2020/08/16/1597554000/1858-early-telegraph-communications/77123>
In a very real sense, the telegram was the beginning our
digital age.
Telegraphs, Phones, Blind Kids and Steve Jobs : Phil Lapsley
wrote a fascinating book called "[Explode The Phone](https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Phil-Lapsley/dp/0802122280)". It is
fascinating story of technology and hacking culture from
telegraphs to somewhere after Steve Jobs and Woz were going
door to door in the Berkeley dorms selling little black boxes.
Phil gave a keynote at [USENIX Security](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20) one year and I was
there and talked to him a bit ... part of his passion was to
record the "Phone Phreak" culture that lead directly to the
modern "Hacking" (good sense) culture while enough of the
principals were still around. I talked to "Captin Crunch",
one of the main subjects of the book at ToorCon one year.
What a character. The entire
hacker/blackhat/freedom-to-tinker movements (and Apple
Computer) owe him homage. Just don't give him a piggy-back
ride. Phil was also the author of [Network News Transport
Protocl (NNTP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol) for for [Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet) and we may get to why Usenet,
pathalias, GNUS and friends may or may not have been a good
idea in later posts.
I want to pick up the story where I have personal history and Phil's book, conveniently runs right up to about that point.
I guess one of my goals parallels his: to document bits of how we got to the "Social Media" (and "walled gardens") of today, as I've live through and been a small player in bits of it.