Showing all posts tagged: history
The origins of the Linux operating system, by Lars Wirzenius
3 March 2025
A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel:
After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter “A” on the screen, the other “B”; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.
A kernel is an integral component of an operating system, which has complete control over everything in the system.
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Twenty-five years blogging, the more things change, the less they change
21 February 2025
Matt Webb has been blogging for twenty-five years. What an incredible milestone. Obviously, much has changed in the realm of self-publishing since Webb started out in 2000. Back then, as he points out, we blogged as if we were using social media platforms like Twitter/X:
So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).
Now we — though maybe not so much myself, or the more #IndieWeb people reading this — use social media platforms, specifically Instagram, as if they were blogging platforms.
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blogs, history, self publishing
Bluesky reaches 30 million members, are you excited, or not?
6 February 2025
Social media and micro-blogging platform Bluesky passed the thirty-million member mark last week. It must be an exciting time for the Bluesky founders and backers. Exciting also for members who had been looking for an alternative to the likes of Twitter/X. I say this as one of the earlier members of Twitter, which I originally signed up for in 2007 I think. At that point though, Twitter was one of a kind; it was the first of its kind. It would spawn numerous competitors, including Plurk, and Identi.ca, though few struggled to gain traction. By the end of 2009, after being online four years, with about twenty-six million members, Twitter was the place to be.
Up until that point, I’d met close to one-thousand people, many of whom knew of me through this website. But a lot were people who’d just stumbled upon my account, and wanted to connect. Here was a place that was one, big, on-going, conversation. Making Twitter friends was easy in those early days (I could say the same about blogging). Twitter seemed like a big old friendly village. But once sky-rocketing growth came — something founders and backers has been eagerly anticipating — things began to change. And that was good. For some. Good, for instance, for the Twitter gurus, those taking it upon themselves to educate the rest of us about the “correct way” to use Twitter.
And of course of influencers. I’m not exactly sure when either arrived en masse, but I’d say many had made their presence felt by 2010. I think that’s when I began to lose interest in the platform: it’d become too much noise, and not enough signal. Having said that, I kept my account going, ticking over, for another decade, then some. But Twitter was no longer that big old friendly village. And nor, of course, could it stay that way. The platform had to grow, and begin making a return for its backers. Some of the people I followed, and who followed me, became gurus and influencers. Some became both. But by then, I wasn’t really interested in them.
I’d been using Twitter for three or four years, I didn’t need someone lecturing me, especially someone who’d spent less time on the platform than I had. As for the influencers, little of what they said meant much to me. But as a platform, Twitter had matured. It was no longer the exciting, pioneering, experience it had once been. I might — if I were more of a social media power user — call Bluesky exciting, but I could never describe it as pioneering. Twitter, for better or worse, is/was the only micro-blogging slash social media platform to stake that claim. Everything else now, like it or lump it, is a case of been there, done that.
Twitter opened up the frontier, blazed the trail. Kind of like the Telegraph Road, no? Twitter built the cities and the roads between them. Bluesky, Mastodon, and whatever else, may be new, relatively new, but they are picking up were Twitter left off. Micro-blogging slash social media platforms are no longer the undiscovered country. I don’t mean to run down Bluesky in particular. Thirty-million members in two years is impressive. But I dare say there are a few gurus and influencers among that number. Maybe too many, all bringing with them more noise, and less signal. It’s enough to make me fear we’re seeing an early-stage re-run of late-stage Twitter.
I might be a member of Bluesky, and Mastodon, but late-stage Twitter is not something I want to see a repeat of. Give me, I say, a tried and true, though hardly new, personal website, any day.
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history, social media, social networks, technology, trends, Twitter
Colonising Mars the same way Australia was colonised
28 January 2025
Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal (conservative) opposition party in Australia, has likened Elon Musk’s plans to establish a colony on Mars, to the British colonisation of Australia:
Addressing the St Matthew’s Australia Day mass in Albury, Ms Ley insisted that British settlers did not land at Sydney Cove “to destroy or to pillage”, but in an experiment to establish a new society. “In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s Space X’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment,” Ms Ley told the church service.
Despite their intentions, over ten thousand Indigenous Australians were killed in clashes with early Australian settlers, between 1788 and 1930.
Ley’s remarks were made on Australia Day, Sunday 26 January 2025. The day is often marked by protests in some quarters, and greeted with ambivalence by others. There are Australians who would like to move the date away from 26 January, being the day in 1788 that the British established a colony at Sydney Cove. Some Australians, particularly Indigenous peoples, feel that the 26 January date celebrates an invasion, rather than national pride.
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Australia, current affairs, history
Australian alternative music radio station Triple J turns fifty
22 January 2025
Australian alternative music radio station Triple J, originally known as Double J, launched fifty-years ago, on Sunday 19 January 1975. Here’s footage of their first few minutes on air (Instagram page), with DJ Holger Brockmann behind the microphone.
With a predominantly youth audience, Triple J especially has struggled with declining ratings in recent years, as large segments of their audience turn to social media for music listening, and discovery. The jays however have been making inroads through podcasts, and their Instagram and TikTok channels, which have sizable followings.
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entertainment, history, jjj, music, radio
Will the good old, friendly web, of twenty years ago, stand up
21 January 2025
Enrique Rey, writing at EL PAÍS:
Like all nostalgic escapism, the myth about a world wide web before the age of sarcasm (and the dominance of big companies) where everything was more sincere and simpler is a melancholic trap. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that when you turn 30 you discover the ability to remember, and those who were teenagers when broadband was installed in most homes are now that age. That is why the internet has filled up with memories of itself, although, with some effort, it is still possible to find new things full of a collaborative spirit. “There is still a lot of kindness on the internet. You just have to go to YouTube and watch those videos about how to fix a specific washing machine,” says Gómez. “A lot of content is a sign of goodwill; the real Youtuber is the one who has 10 views on each video. There are a lot of sweet, practical, erratic, very strange things there, and also a lot of people helping others selflessly,” she notes.
Even though I sometimes think the web of the late 1990’s was a friendly online world.
One difference (of many) between the web of today, and that “simpler, less complicated” web of twenty-plus years ago, is the bloated noise to signal ratio, and, and, social media (and social media influencers), which are combining to choke out this friendly web, which is very much still there.
If only you know where to find it.
Rey makes no mention of indie web/small web, but if you’re seeking out that old, friendly online world of decades passed, then indie web/small web is one place where you’ll find, or rediscover, it.
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Demolishing the AC/DC house, and what little rock history Australia has
18 January 2025
I’m not really a fan of the band that was formed in Sydney in 1973, and is still going strong, but it seems odd that the house where founders, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young used to live, and founded AC/DC, was not worthy of preserving. For those not in the know, AC/DC are probably Australia’s version of the Rolling Stones. But last month, the residence, in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Burwood, was bulldozed to make way for a high rise apartment block.
This might sound like over-development on steroids, but many parts of Australia, including Sydney, are experiencing accommodation shortages, and high density housing is one of the solutions. While numerous people, including the local municipal council, were aware of the house’s history, this was not enough to spare the property. Mind you, I’m not sure how the house could have been kept, and somehow integrated in the much needed residential development.
For more about the story of the “AC/DC house”, and its demolition, check out this short YouTube clip by Sydney Morning Herald writer, Tom Compagnoni.
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Australia, Australian music, history, music, Sydney
Rambles.NET, a webzine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999
6 January 2025
Rambles.NET is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media present.
I had a crack at publishing a webzine way back in the day, something called channel static (Internet Archive link). Notice my ever-present use of lower case styling for proper website names.
Like all good webzines of the day (and today), Rambles published articles on a wide range of topics, including music, film, literature, pop culture, nature, history, science, religion, steampunk, and the supernatural. Check out the impressive list of past and present contributors.
In a way, I always considered disassociated to be more a webzine than anything else. Granted, only with one writer, and very much on and off in the twenty-five plus years this website has been online.
Rambles has no RSS feed that I can see, so you’ll have to read it the old fashion way: with a browser.
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history, IndieWeb, publishing, self publishing, writing
Storing digital data for one hundred years: how is this possible?
2 January 2025
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:
If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century?
It’s a longer piece, which goes to show how deceptively simple the question is. But how about the RAMAC 305 system, a computer developed by IBM in the 1950’s? This was the first commercial computer to use a moving head hard disk drive, called a 350 storage unit. But the RAMAC 305 was just too big, and heavy, to have much commercial appeal, and production was discontinued.
However, the 350 was capable of storing data for the long term. The real long term. When one of the 350 storage units was restored in 2002, Joe Feng, who was part of the restoration team, said “the RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.”
I think it’s time to somehow bring back the 350 storage unit.
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The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web
27 December 2024
Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:
Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.
disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.
The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.
As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.
And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.
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