In 1984 I was working at a research institute that shared a VAX statistical system with several other research institutes. On the VAX you could send a primitive kind of 48 character IM to other people who were logged on at the same time.
One night I got a message from User243 of another institute: "You the tall psychologist with a red beard?" Yes. "Beer-Francos-9:00, blonde in blue"
We spent most of the evening talking about how, if we ended up together (we did not), there would be a story in the New York Times romance section, because who ever heard of people meeting over a computer. Insane!
Things change.
The internet is being very good and also bad at giving me 200M information. But it looks like at least 4 people ran faster than Usain in the first heat, although no one in his heat--but both Jamaicans who qualified were faster than him. I hope he has his head on straight and his feet set to fleet.
My sister is reminding me that PT cousin says Usain is annoying in person, but...I don't really care. I don't have to spend time with him--I think he gives good image, plays the cocky man-boy pretty well, because he turns on the respect often enough that people know he's serious. He's not getting dinged the way Daley Thompson or Carl Lewis did, when they were on top of their worlds. In person, I'd only need a couple hours of his time and really no requirement for conversation at all.
This NDA project is driving me nuts. I can't walk over to people's desk to talk about stuff, or call them. It's a weird sort of restriction when you *have* to email, or when you're being deliberately vague over the phone. Like, I don't want to talk about security either, where people can hear. Makes me feel weird.
Rick, that would've be awesome.
I remember being on Prodigy bulletin boards back in...1993 or so? Sophomore or junior year of high school. And I remember my friends who graduated a year ahead of me in 94 getting email at their colleges, but I still sent them actual letters, until the next year when I was at college and had an email address (back in the day of telnetting and talk!).
I remember thinking it was okay to share information via fingering, and then thinking it was insane to put all that out there, and now...Facebook and Foursquare. So, cycles.
share information via fingering
I do not understand this statement. And the mental picture it is giving me is causing me to raise my eyebrows.
(i only got online in 1998 or so)
Vital Olympic news:
Australia finally has more gold medals than New Zealand! >[link]
share information via fingering
'finger' was a Unix command that would give you info on the person you fingered. That info came from a file that people would set up on their network--what was that file called?
eta:
The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory.
Ah yes, I had a .plan file on some network somewhere in the past.
In Unix, you could "finger" a user, if you knew what server they had their account on. This is the first example I found:
finger skywalker@moe.cc.emory.edu
Luke Skywalker (skywalke) is not presently logged in.
Last seen at moe on Mon Jul 23 05:13:06 2001 from larry.cc.emory.edu
Mail forwarded to skywalke@mail.service.emory.edu.
Project: Save the galaxy!
Plan:
*Star-hopping Friday night with Han
*Appointment with Yoda Monday at 3:15pm
The information given would vary, but it could be a lot of detail, including when you'd last been on or read your mail, or whatever. Stalkeriffic.
I would have chosen a different name.
in 1995, my college got email, but I was very against it. My BFF figured out the password (I think that your password was your name or something-- very insecure), and she sent funny emails from other people, including a professor. They were very silly. This made me even more suspicious of this email thing!
Oh yeah, I remember dying laughing over fingering people.
We spent most of the evening talking about how, if we ended up together (we did not), there would be a story in the New York Times romance section, because who ever heard of people meeting over a computer. Insane!
That's awesome, Rick.
