It's been a long time since I wrote a Nothing New Under the Sun post, a tribute to new ways of doing old things. This time out an ode to Wikipedia or perhaps to Citizendium, or probably to search engines in general.
O' In the Before Time...
Back when you judged your log on speed by the screech and clack pitch of your 300 baud modem, there were things like UseNets. I used these extensively when I worked at Lincoln Labs (start with Nothing New Under the Sun (Buying Computer Time, part 2)... and read on. I can't speak for all of them and the ones I routinely trawled were where true intellectual intensities could be found. Interestingly, I don't remember anything like flame-wars taking place. Those came onto the internet much later (or so it seems to me). Some of the usenets I remember include one on relativity and physics (it's morphed to the web as Usenet Physics FAQ) chemistry (couldn't find it at all), an MIT archive (now as sci FAQs By Newsgroup, creationism-evolution discussions (now as The TalkOrigins Archive, ...
You'll notice that most of these have moved to the 'net. Hasn't everything?
This post would be remiss if it didn't also honor those early web pioneers who created respectable information sites for no reason other than they wanted to. These in things like The Ebola Page (don't go looking, what you'd find now is...well...isn't The Ebola Page) and their ilk. Now-a-days, if there's not an ad it ain't getting published. Sigh.
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Links for this post:
- BizMediaScience Nothing New Under the Sun Blog Posts
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