"Joe Haubenreich" wrote in
message . ..
"Calif Bill" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Was Arpa net and Darpa net. I was on Arpa Net in about 1981 range. We
were
fed from Stanford, I think, via another company near us in Milpitas, Ca.
We
had sold our Building to Xerox when they bought Shugart Associates as we
were between Building 4 and 5 in Sunnyvale. Dang I is old."
----------------------

Nah, Bill... you aren't that old. In fact, you're still a cub.

Usenet, Rime-Net, Hair-Net.... they're all light years ahead of what we
had
when I entered the workforce -- scratching crude pictures and symbols on
boulders and rolling them from cube to cube! "Rock-n-roll" was fast,
cheap,
and required little OJT. For short notes, a fist-size rock would do. My
head
still throbs in memory of all the jokes and chain-rocks that whizzed
around
our community.

Of course, rock-n-roll found its way from the office to society in
general,
and then parents were faced with the challenge of figuring out the rock
symbols their teenagers devised and used among themselves. (There was no
respect for convention even back in the day.)

Once a technology has become entrenched, troglodytes will hold onto to it
forever. As I visit the major cities of the U.S., I'm pleased to note that
the denizens still adhere to the old ways, as evidenced by bricks whizzing
through the air at political rallies and large, flamboyant messages posted
on brick walls, alleyways, bridge pilings, stationary boxcars, subway
tunnels... almost any highly-visible, vertical surface invites
correspondence.

Boy, what excitement filled the place when someone introduced the
technique
of using a stylus to press cuneiform patterns pressed into moist clay
tablets. Very neat, but talk about slow! We had to let them cure before we
could send over to the other cubes in our office or to other cave
complexes.
And, as we later learned, every technological advance in communications
created a buracracy and new jobs. Cuneiform writing wasn't easy (it took a
while to learn to speak Phoenecian and the Ugarit alphabet), so every
complex ended up with a HRD department for training the workers. Then we
had
to develop specialist for archiving. If someone sent you a note and you
wanted to refer to it later, all you had to do was run down to the stacks,
where all the notes were categorized by subject, or by sent date, or by
last
update, or by author, or by recipient. (We seem to have not advanced to
far
on that evolutionary path, have we?)

As I progressed in my career, we witnessed communication fads come and go.
Smoke signals were pretty cool, and you could send them over long distance
(much easier than rocks!) but when health-nicks caught wind of the risks
involved, they instituted "no smoking in public places" policies, which
damped that technological advance. Pounding on hollow logs and later
skin-covered drums was neat at first. All the nerds who knew how to drum
were snapped up by companies and drumming became "cool," but as that more
and more people jumped into the act and that technology proliferated, the
airwaves became cluttered. We were always having our messages intercepted,
and too many people online simultaneously clogged the network. The feds
put
the kibosh on that with HIPPA, since it's hard to maintain confidentiality
in the open forum of drum messaging.

Fads came and went... papyrus, parchment, paper... then along came
Guglielmo
Marconi, Claude Chappe and Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, John Logie
Baird, and all those braniacs who ushered in the paperless workplaces that
we all enjoy today.

Al Gore added structure and elegance to electronic communications when he
and Ali McGraw (or was it Tipper), invented the Internet. And that's where
we find ourselves today. Don't get too settled on this "Internet" thing.
I'm
sure it's just a passing fad, and soon we'll all be abuzz with
"simul-thought-casting" or something else.

Joe



LOL!