Class 6 - Pre-web internet history
Apéritif
RFC as koan
- A. Bhushan, RFC 69: Distribution List Change for MIT (September 22, 1970)
Emulator as koan
Themes
- pre-WWW online communication
- BBS history and culture
- Usenet, teletext, FIDOnet
- Communities
Prompts
- When did computing move from mostly work tasks to personal usage?
- What is community?
- Who was online before September 1993?
Description
Episodes: - S2E3 “The Way In”, S2E4 “Play with Friends”, S2E5 “Extract and Defend”
As Mutiny grows, the significance of communcating online plays a bigger and bigger role in the success of the company – through playing games and also through online chat. As emphasized in previous episodes, users are thrilled to have a place to talk to other people, favored over all other features provided by modem connections.
Readings
- Claire L. Evans, Untitled (“Broad Band”), XOXO Conf (September 2018)
- Howard Rheingold, What the WELL’s Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community, July 2012
- Katie Hafner, The Epic Saga of the Well, Wired (May 1997)
- Kevin Driscoll, Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System, IEEE Spectrum (October 2016)
- Michael Hauben, Ronda Hauben, On the Early Days of Usenet: The Roots of the Cooperative Online Culture (August 1998)
- Janelle Brown, A kindler, gentler usenet (Sept 1998)