Now I’m not going to pretend to have my finger on the pulse of this fine community site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that at least a few of you will enjoy this post by the world’s oldest living nerd, Sifu Tweety. I will now quote far too much of it.
Everything on the internet is always the same. Like the wingnut function, online culture is endlessly self-similar. Everything you think first happened on blogs? It’s happened at least three or four times before, and every time, it seemed as new, as exciting, and as unprecedented as it does now. The spunky, close-knit underground community that threatens to be split apart by rivalries, flame wars, and growing corporatization? That was a big worry, in 1994, in the hacker scene. It was a big deal in 1989 in the BBS scene, and in 1983 in the hacker scene, and it probably happened in 1971 when the University of Hawaii joined ARPAnet and surf punks started trolling the Jefferson Airplane forums. The crush of unprecedented media attention, the surprising thrill of that first meatspace meeting; all of that happened a thousand times over on AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, in subcultures from knitting to bass tablature to Islamic terrorism.
[…]
I mean, OK, it’s awesome. I think people on the left should get their asses motivated for politics. It’s important! They should use the internet. It’s useful! It’s exciting! I’m happy that there’s a convention in Las Vegas. I’ve been to loads of those, they’re always a good time. But have you ever been to a rock concert? If, OK, somebody handed out acid and there was an inflatable donkey flying out over the crowd, you’d be closer, but from everything I’ve heard it’s a seedy Vegas convention hall full of well-meaning internet aware forty somethings: distinctly not a rock concert. I went to that party, ten years ago, the activists were hacktivists, and it was called DefCon. Ten years before that it was called GenCon, ten years before that Rotterdam Amiga DemoCon 1981, BiMonTandyOlympics at the Ramada on the Freeway, COMDEX. Whatever. But holy crap it’s not Jamestown. We’re nerds. With a nerd hobby. We can, and should, raise money and talk about issues and push for what we believe and, importantly, make fun of dumbasses, but the conventions and the media attention and the self-congratulatory pronouncements are not only an inevitable and functionally meaningless part of the evolution of any subcultural internet nerd tribe, they are a complete distraction from the actual useful business that could be done…
He goes on to say rude things about Byron York without mentioning his hair, so be sure to read the whole thing.
The BBS days started at least by 1978 on CP/M machines and to my certain knowledge in 1979 using Apple IIs because I bought a copy of ABBS from the defunct company Peripherals Unlimited. Not 1988 as was claimed by Tweety.
So, yes, us nerds were there 10 BT (Before Tweety.)
I stand corrected. I wonder then, who is the oldest living nerd and how many years BT did that nerd hit the scene?
Please to define ‘nerd.’
I was messing around with an IBM BASIC language trainer in 1970. My father-in-law was messing around with computers in 1948. Does the, never really working, Babbage Engine count? How about the Greek mathematicans doing their calculations on the beach? (THAT’S nerdy!)
And how nerdistic to talk about the definition of nerd …
8^)
I’m not actually that old, in the scheme of things. I wasn’t a hacker in 1983, except insofar as I could convince myself the word meant “has a firm grasp of basic LOGO programming”. I inferred that year as one of great turmoil in the computer underground because, well, that’s when War Games came out. I’m sure that the BBS world had it’s share of dude-you’re-selling-out flare-ups well before I was involved. I just picked ’88 because I (almost certainly incorrectly) remembered that as the year Boardwatch magazine hit the scene.
Shoot I don’t think I even had a modem until 1990, maybe?
But, really, the great internet virus triumphalism comes up ALL THE TIME. Anybody who was even peripherally aware of the .com era should have noticed this.
Well I hope you run with the BT thing, despite not actually being the oldest living nerd. I can only think of one other cat who got the before treatment with dates and he’s still pretty popular with the kids. Your post was wonderful, by the way. I thought it would go over like deep fried toast over here and we’d have 40 million comments on it, but I’m wrong about a lot of stuff. I loved it and wished I had written it, for whatever that’s worth.
LOGO! Wow. That takes me back. I wrote a real time control system in LOGO. Once. But only Once. The Learning Curve is steep but ruthless.
Anyhow, I’m fairly confident the accusations of ‘Sell-Out’ started at the second meeting of the Santa Monica Computer Club. Having known and worked with some of the founders — I’m really confident. ;-0
As far as Online content, Compuserve has been around since 1969 so even I am 10 years too young for The Beginning Of It All. When I did get on the scene Triumphalism was well-established but, I submit, there was more than a grain of truth in some of the ‘over-the-top’ claims made in 1978.
Tweety’s a young pup. I was writing my first malware by 1979 (a joke simulator of the Commodore PET OS I’d leave on the computers at my high school that’d accept a number of lines of BASIC typed into it & then start kicking out random insults & jokes when the poor student tried to run the program he’d spent all period typing in) & trading warez on floppy disks at COMDEX New York in 1981.
The first hacker sellout I can think of would be Bill “the Cracker” Landreth, who co-authored “Out of the Inner Circle” with Howard Rheingold in the early/mid 80s after he got caught running around the timesharing x.25 networks.
Every generation thinks theirs is the one that’s figured it all out, that the Singularity is right around the corner. Maybe it is & maybe it isn’t. Blogs are a lot better type of forum than Usenet newsgroups, which were a lot better than FidoNet feeds, which were better than standalone BBSes. But the thing that comes after blogs will be better than them.