Comment by dannyobrien
6 days ago
At least in my experience, this is ahistorical. Personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s lived outside of academia, as did bulletin boards. The productive, creative, and empowering elements of the Internet and the Web were subversive actions that existed -- and in some cases were barely tolerated -- within its academic usage.
You say "there is very little you and I can do about it". Even if you don't listen to me, perhaps you might listen to the coiner of the term "enshittification"? https://archive.is/CqA8w
Huh? Computing in the 70’s and 80’s was almost entirely driven by academia - even being run by schools.
I agree with the author who said that is ahistorical...at least from my, and the people I grew up with's, perspectives. I grew up with computers in the 70's and 80's and while you may be thinking of centralized computing (minicomputers and mainframes), the personal computing revolution was widely distributed, not centralized in academia. BBSes, swap meets, user groups, even the corner Radio Shack was where 'computing' was vibrant and active. (And the magazines...SO many 'zines!)
We may be talking past each other, but my experience of computing in the 70's and 80's was definitely not academic.
That didn’t start to become common until the early/mid 80’s.
Did it exist a little? Of course. But it was dwarfed by the other stuff going on. I suspect your (and a lot of other HN) experience is going to bias on the hobbiest side though, as does mine. I only found out about the much larger stuff going on at the same time much later.
Almost all the early networking stuff (UUCP, pre-Internet internet like Arpanet, early Usenet, Gopher, even HTML and the WWW, etc) was academic institutions or related.
Often with military grants/contracts. Sometimes with purely commercial contracts, but even those were almost always for some Gov’t project. The amount of work on basics like sorting algorithms that grew out gov’t research is mind boggling, for instance.
There is a lot of well documented history on this.
Then PCs and halfway decent modems became available (2400 baud+), and things changed very rapidly.
Mid 80’s, BBS’s started sprouting like weeds. There were a few before then, but the truly hobbiest ones were very niche.
Then even more so with commercial services like Prodigy, then AOL, then actual ISPs, etc.
1 reply →