The dream still lives, I suppose, if you can filter out all the kruft. I definitely have stopped idealizing on-line interactions over face to face. There’s got to be some kind of happy medium.

A public access UNIX system that I’m a proud member of, do still run telnet as it was traditionally intended.  Although most users stick to ssh.  Feel free to finger me, I think it still works, I don’t remember if it’s set right.

BTW, I’m morally obligated to set your MCSE certs on fire if you’re claiming to be a MCSE vet. and have no idea what telnet is.

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jason@textfiles.com
archive.org

Archiving and preserving computer history is right up their ally.

Maybe you could whip up some nostalgia cheese!

Every time I encounter one I have to sit and watch for a while.

Flat out blocking the port is so boring, and god forbid you actually accept a username and password these days.. that’s the computer equivalent of hiding a key under the doormat.

Contrary to Cliff’s assertion  no one needed to re-post anything daily like we still must do with Craig’s List – CM was data-based as opposed to the prevalent message-based systems. The third generation system used a dual indexed and networked database – you could attach index words after an item was posted (your words got higher status if you were the item author) and you could link to the item. Order of entry had very little meaning in a search.

CM could have been a dial-in system (we had an experimental package for this kind of use) but our focus was on developing a tool for nucleating social-exchange centers (we were quite proud of our two laundromat installations). We specifically didn’t want CM to be something “for computer people only”. We failed at marketing and made the error of filling the system from the center rather than discovering and encouraging users to fill the system from the bottom up.

CM started well before the Internet (we knew about ARPANET and its precursors) and the PC (we had contacts at Xerox PARC and got to see the Alto system in development). The hardware problems illuminated by CM caused me to start thinking about how computer technology could survive in a public hands-on environment. The M&R Pennywhistle-103 kit modem, which dropped the price of a 300-baud modem to $129, was designed in 1973 for CM and the prototype was used in the first CRT terminal installation.

CM was the effort that opened the door to cyberspace and allowed us to experience it as friendly territory. Efrem deserves the credit for the hands-on public-access configuration – I had been exploring technological possibilities for enhancing many-to-many communication for several years and had joined the group (Resource One Inc.) that had a similar idea and had secured possession of the SDS-940 mainframe. Many others assisted.

It’s ironic that the only record we have of these early electronic forms of communication seems to be in the form of physical photographs.

I wonder how much of the content we are creating today on the Internet will be lost in another forty years? Will anything remain?

Lots of countercultural postings – craigslist and usenet rolled up with a dash of twitter.  Never did find the cheap apartments that were supposed to be on the Community Memory, nor did I buy that 10-speed bike whose ad was reposted daily.

Original article also references the Plato computer – as a grad student, I programmed several orbit-calculating programs for these machines (using an obscure language called “Tutor”).  My programs only attracted other users after I turned it into a primitive game of hitting other planets.

The idea that these things represented was basically something that’d been on my mind since I first learned you could connect computer to phone and dial another box somewhere. This was before i knew BBS’s existed or anything.To see how far we’ve come in forty years. The equivilant of terminal payphones and now we have… Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, etc etc.

Wrote a srt piece detailing what this might have grown into. Maybe. CommTel though this piece was more focused on minitel really could make an argument community memory is still relavent.

An modem back then costs about $300 bucks, about $800 bucks in today’s rates.  Imagine a small bank of them and the phone line costs.  And you’re still not on the internet.

And then there’s other systems on the internet, via telnet.  Yea, telnet, remember there’s other ports besides port 80?

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