Where does the word Spam come from? And Google? And what was Gopher and .. Veronica?
My friend James “Java” Kaluli was musing the other night while idling the time away trying to incinerate a database.
“Whatever happened to all those great ideas form the last century, like Gopher and Clarinet”
I asked him what he thought about present web ideas like Facebook and their long term future, which got us thinking about where some of these concepts originated. So here goes in no particular order. The end bit features more ideas from the previous millenium.
Google (1995) – Starts at Stanford University as Backrub in 1995, banned for using too much bandwidth (on Stanfords Unix system – text commands me maties) uploaded by the cunning Larry Page and Sergey Brin. By 1998 the boys have $100 000 in investment capital and in 1998 Craig
Silverstein, also a Stanford graduate, joins the gang. The rest, they say, is searchable.
Blog -1998) A blog is a mix or portmanteau of the term “web log” – shortened for folk in 1998 who pusa’d too much espresso and couldn’t finish one word before starting another, which really began as a part of a website with personal views, and first given credence by Compuserve in the same year.
Twitter (2006) – Noah Glass is now god. With a small G. He was once broke and now, worth billions. TWTTR is how it started, why? Because he got pissed one night at a party in San Francisco
in 2006. South on the famous 101 highway is Palo Alto – where Google started. ”You read it first
on Twitter” is a very 2010 thing, and has seen bizarre moments like Chavez of Venezuela telling the world his gas condensate rig had sunk on Twitter before he had a media conference earlier in 2010.
Social networking (1993) – began with BBS or bulletin boards on Clarinet and gopher in 1993, the empire of Compuserve grabbed it and it grew into a plethora of noise that is now dominated by
Facebook and in 1995 Amazon, Yahoo and others took Classmates.com into a new era. There are
now upwards of 270 of these digital personal bulletin boards in English. In Chinese? How do you
count in Mandarin?
Facebook (2004) started by Mark Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard – social networking volte farce.
Supposed to help you contact your schoolmates across the globe and has transmogrified into a networking ogre. Technically a copy-cat of Clarinet with pictures and now a must-have on Web 2.0, and allows folk to exchange online petitions, pictures of cats and piggies, and find long-lost
schoolmates. Made $1bn in the last financial year out of a very old idea. Like selling food.
Browser - (1990) the first phrase called worldwideweb was launched in .. yes.. San Francisco by Tim Berners-Lee (bless his little cotton keyboard) and then co-opted by CERN maths guru Nicola Pellow who ensured the concept could be used by the early DOS launched by he-who-may-not-be-named.
Quickly morphed into Netscape, Lynx, Cello, and Opera. No, Bill Gates did not invent it. He co-
opted it. Neither did Al “soiled-undies” Gore.
Spam – (1939) – tinned pork shoulder, mixed with salt, water and modified potato starch, kept pink by sodium nitrite and became famous during the second World war when troops were supplied tinned
spam. But this phrase was most famously given legs by a Monty Python piece where the word Spam
is repeated over and over by a vendor inside a movie house. Hilarious. Not like Spam which as we know, is repeated over and over.
Phishing (1987)- comes from phreaking, which were baits used to capture passwords and bank details from as early as 1987 by telephone monitors. The term phreak is a portmanteau of the words phone and freak. Phreaks used phone systems audio frequences to steal signals and copying conversations. Believe this, Yoda, the first phreaks were by often very very good at using their ears
- and, often, were blind. (For those who’re patronizing little freaks .. sorry .. phreaks, check out
Australian and Minnesota USA court cases of 1987) Yes. Blind people can be normal criminals too. P
for phreaking, and H for Hack and thus, Phishing.
Denial of service – (2000) - Began on February 7th 2000 although there’s some debate about exactly
when. 1987 is sooo long ago. Terrible viruses like Trinoo and Tribal Flood Network took out
California college networks and CNN’s initial site, along with eBay. Ping attacks (ask your IT friends), Smurf attacks, and similar floods of mails designed to take down your mail servers.
Flaming (1991) – as early as 1991 flaming between folk who ran internet boards was common practice, particularly different social networking groups in campuses across the USA who were members of partisan groups like largely on campuses. Very quickly degenerated into sexists vs feminists, right vs left, blah blah.
And a list of web words that have consigned to the scrap heap -
Cyberpunk - originally hosted in South Africa by Simon Spiller in Yeoville with post-industrial parties of note, and based on William Gibsons’ concepts. Gibson coined the phrase Cyberspace in his great work of fiction “Neuromancer”. Cyberpunk was an international cultural genre of science fiction. It all revolved around a kind of post-industrial nuclear meltdown which appeared likely in the late ’80s – kind of like Mad Max mixed with the Sex Pistols. It still lives, although no-one really calls it Cyberpunk. It’s probably part of the emo culture now.
Archie was a software tool for finding files stored on anonymous ftp sites, where you needed the exact phrase to search. Google put paid to that and by 1999 it had blown out. Just as the internet bubble popped.
ARPANET – the original internet of the late 60′s and early 70′s and was the originator of TCP/IP protocols we all use today. Hail the king, Arpanet.
Gopher – which was invented at the University of Minnesota in ’93 and used Unix commands – just before the Web (which uses Hypertext), but had great resources for ‘varsities world wide, including one of the earliest links between Rhodes, Wits, and Stanford. (remember Pipex?)
Mosaic – was the first world wide web browser available for Macs, Windows and Unix all with the same look and feel! Way ahead of its time, it led directly to the popularity of the web as a generic concept using object programing. It was another mid-west varsity in the US that launched his idea in ’93 – the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications or NCSA. Never heard of them have you?
SLIP –or Serial Line Internet Protocol which was a standard popular in the early ’90s for using a telephone line (serial line) and a modem to connect to a computer and has been utterly replaced by PPP.
Veronica — or Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives – you guessed it, first launched in the US Mid-west. This time the University of Nevada which was just a constantly
updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of gopherservers.
Some great ideas there, me maties. Will Facebook join Veronica soon, rather than vice versa?
We’ll see.
My friend James “Java” Kaluli was musing the other night while idling the time away trying to incinerate a database.
“Whatever happened to all those great ideas from the last century, like Gopher and Clarinet”
I asked him what he thought about present web ideas like Facebook and their long term future, which got us thinking about where some of these concepts originated. So here goes in no particular order. The end bit features more ideas from the previous millenium.
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