Viewing profile — nickdothutton

I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).

Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.

I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but…

As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in a…

While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in th…

At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I …

In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to rep…

We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (most…

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that look…

I started out on Z80 when HLL compilers were expensive for me and the shareware alternatives weren’t so accessible as open source is today. Everyone should do at least a little ass…

The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the …

I really wish LinkedIn would collapse and close so that something useful could take its place. At the moment I feel like it's squatting the "business networking" square on the boar…

Seek out his various interviews on YouTube.

Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

The "real banned books" are (in my opinion) generally those which have not been translated.

Reminder: In the UK we do not know where the trains are. We know what section of track they are on, but not where within the section. A section could be miles long. To know more pr…

I don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.

They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass with…

"I want to do the thing that gets me the most votes and carries the least political risk". Note this is not necessarily the wisest thing, or even the thing that objectively solves …

This sort of shenanigan is why it’s important to have a competitive market for CPUs.

We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.

AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched w…

If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.

The UK student loan book regularly changes hands on the secondaries market at half of face value. Make of that what you will. Draw whatever conclusions you might about the market v…

Supercalc2, Maxam2, dBASE II. You could do a lot with CP/M software, especially if you had access to a hard drive which would eliminate the "insert floppy disk X into drive Y" tedi…