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https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
Al Gore and the Internet: By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Kind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).
There was a brief period where BBSs also offered various gateway services into the Internet a long with the normal BBS services like doors. I received my first ever email address from a huge local BBS back in the early early 90s by paying a token fee every month. I had nobody I knew with email addresses until a few years later so it was kind of pointless, but it did work. On a larger scale, when AOL started offering…
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/the_hideous_name/
Make sense of this one:
research!ucbvax!@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT
http://ifmail.sourceforge.net/
FidoNet is a network of BBSes which has email and Usenet-like discussion boards called echoes.
Kind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).
Oh, well. I guess we should be happy they're not insisting the Internet was invented at CERN in 1995.
There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone service…
Wikipedia sets this one straight, anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
> The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.
Citation: Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967) as quoted here:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/50-ye...
Quoted post unavailable.
Oooh cool, time to paste the link again. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Al Gore and the Internet: By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
/s
Not one mention of FIdoNet?
There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship. I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone service…
The myth was that the ARPANET was designed to survive nuclear war. Wikipedia sets this one straight, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET > The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticize…
Volunteer moderators on Facebook. Perhaps I am misunderstanding this sentence. There have been a few documentaries showing how Facebook does moderation. It is done by low paid workers, e.g, in the Phillipines or Ireland, not volunteers. The first line moderation work is contracted out.
There is actually profound lack of moderation because (a) moderators are overwhelmed and cannot keep up and (b) the priority of Facebook is what attracts the most traffic ("engagement") not meeting standards. If some group page is getting lots of traffic then it goes into a special category. The moderators cannot delete it without approval from FTEs at Facebook. The number one priority is traffic,^1 not upholding any standard for content. Any standards enforced are only created in response to complaints. Section 230 shields Facebook from most of the potential legal liability.
1. Under the guise of soundbites such as "connecting the world" and "giving everyone a voice". People can be connected and have a voice and still only "engage" with Facebook periodically/sporadically. Overall, low traffic. But without both high traffic and ads, Facebook's days are numbered. Hence, ever more indignant, angry, extreme content is required to draw "engagement".
Edit: Thank you @LamdaComplex. I think that explains it.
This reads like a college student who was assigned a book review assignment and wrote it an hour before class.
"This work is still being done on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. But unlike the sysops who enabled the flourishing of early online communities, the volunteer moderators on today's platforms do not own the infrastructures they oversee." Volunteer moderators on Facebook. Perhaps I am misunderstanding this sentence. There have been a few documentaries showing how Facebook does moderation. It is done by low paid wor…