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76 lines
4.5 KiB
HTML
76 lines
4.5 KiB
HTML
<html>
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<title>T E X T F I L E S</title>
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<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#00FF00" LINK="#00FF00" ALINK="#00FF00" VLINK="#00FF00">
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<CENTER>
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<TABLE WIDTH=80%>
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<TR><TD VALIGN=TOP ALIGN=RIGHT>
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<FONT FACE="Courier New" COLOR="#33FF33">
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="index.html">INTRODUCTION</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="jason.html">THE BBS YEARS</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="internet.html">><B>THE INTERNET</B></A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="textfiles.html">TEXTFILES</A> </nobr><BR>
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<nobr><A style="text-decoration: none" HREF="today.html">10 YEARS</A> </nobr><BR>
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</FONT>
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<TD BGCOLOR="#00FF00">
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<TD>
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<blockquote>
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<FONT FACE="Courier New" COLOR="#00FF00" size=+2>
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<b>THE INTERNET</b>
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</font>
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<br>
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<font face="Courier New" COLOR="#00FF00">
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<small><i>In which it all starts happening too fast</small></i>
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<p>
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College happened for me in 1988, when I graduated from three wonderful years at <a href="http://hg.ccsd.ws/">Horace Greeley High
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School</a> and got into <a href="http://www.emerson.edu">Emerson College</a> in Boston, Massachusetts. I moved up there for my freshman year
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and never went back; I live in that state to this day. With this move came a dorm room, no home
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computer the first semester (my father thought it would be distracting) and, of course, the end of
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the Works BBS. I closed it up, and in one of those situations that smacks of utter irony, my father
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disposed of the hard drive of the computer, losing that part of my history permanently.
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<p>
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<hr width=100 color="#00FF00">
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<p>
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At Emerson, I came to eventually use the occasional bulletin board system, but the day to day living
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on them ceased. Instead, I learned about what we now think of as the Internet, that globally connected
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set of machines that allow people to be sitting at one computer and connect to many others. But in 1989
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it was a very different place. For someone who'd come up through bulletin boards, the discussions of
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Usenet, the speed of file transfer, the depth of UNIX, the instantaneous connections, were mind blowing.
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BBSes didn't have a chance; I was on the Internet to stay.
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<p>
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<a href="http://album.textfiles.com/index.cgi?d=2002.05.html9.MITFLEA&id=p1010047.jpg"><img src="images/works.jpg" border=0 vspace=10 hspace=10 align=right></a>
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As I turned away from BBSes, one or two still stayed in my sights. A chance meeting on a computer
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bulletin board put me in touch with one Dave Weinstock, later Dave Ferret, who offered to bring The Works
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BBS back from the dead. I gave him my floppy backups of the BBS and he did so, running the BBS for
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years and years, bringing it a fame and putting me in the initially uncomfortable position of emeritis
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administrator. I watched a new generation live the amazing life I had, but ten years later and
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with much better equipment. And a massive multi-line BBS in the Boston area called Argus, with its
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dozens of phone lines and conferencing rooms, gave me a local place to hang out with the knowledge
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that everyone there was probably in the city as well. For all its miracles, the Internet was never quite
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so good at that side of things.
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<p>
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But it was good at so much more, and as the years went by, I watched it stun me further and further
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with what so many great minds could produce. I used a protocol named Gopher that allowed you to traverse
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computers as easily as a menu, and then watched this upstart called The World Wide Web stumble in years
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later and eat Gopher's lunch. I gained accounts on computers all over, posted to message bases, and
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watched the Web grow from a stack of grey pages into multi-colored sound and graphic extravaganzas.
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Where once a night of calling bulletin boards would yield me a handful of paragraphs, I was heading
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through what seemed like endless growing collections at a rate that put my previous years to shame.
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<p>
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By 1998, I'd been on the Internet for about 10 years. I'd used computers of one sort or another
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for something like 20. I was, as people sometimes feel at that age, a hardened veteran and world-weary
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traveler, wishing he could go back to simpler times when just seeing text moving slowly across the
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screen opened a world. I missed the BBS years. I missed my BBS. I decided to go see what this massive
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world wide web had to say about that time.
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<p>
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It didn't have much to say at all.
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<p>
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<i>Learn about the <a href="textfiles.html">website</a> I put up....</i>
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<P>
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</FONT>
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</blockquote>
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</TD></TR>
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</TABLE>
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</CENTER>
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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