73402,3893

The addresses were in octal form so the one thing they never included was a 9.

I joined in the early 80s when a journalism professor friend of mine and I drove to Columbus to visit. CompuServe was booming at the time, enough for it to want to hire journalists who could do “videotex editing”.

There were excavators outside the windows and oil drum fires over which workers warmed their hands, the entire enterprise being funded by a torrent of money generated by something called the CB Simulator (that’s CB as in CB radio). What is now called a chat room was a novelty then, paid for by the hour and with anonymity assured by the numeric addresses. Free local calls, the growing availability of PCs and modems, and an expanding network of local access points around the country made it possible.

The business of online forums, software downloads and chat rooms got going originally as a way of generating extra revenue at night using idle computer resources of an insurance company.

Wikipedia doesn’t reveal anything about it but CompuServe had an interesting technology strategy. At one point, so I’ve read, more than 90% of the DEC System-10s ever made were running in Compuserve data centers in and around Columbus. These were obsolete computers, no longer in production and useless to anyone else, but like gold dust to CompuServe because they could be pressed into service to run its proprietary software and host ever larger numbers of users. (It later migrated to Windows NT servers).

For about 10 years from the mid 80s to mid 90s CompServe was where you went to get support information on IT. Every hardware and software company from Adobe to Zyxel had a forum where you could post questions, get answers and download software updates.

To minimise time online, and keep the hourly bills down, scripting programs were developed that could dial up and collect and post information as fast as one’s modem could send it.

Offline and in the dark in pre-Internet days in the 80s in Aberdeen I found away to connect with a scripting program and BP’s X.25 packetswitching network (it had taken over Sohio by then). Getting useful answers to questions overnight and from far away, long before Google, was quite a kick. More than that, I couldn’t have done my job without access to it. At that point I opened a corporate account — after all, why should I subsidize an oil company?

A few years later I got a new boss who ran her eye over that and said I don’t think we need this. It was a sign that it was time to move on.

By then Compuserve was setting up overseas. For quite a few years I set traveling colleagues up with Compuserve accounts as a way of getting affordable dial-up connectivity in thousands of places around the world in order for them to exchange email, and of course I did it myself.

Eventually I converted my account to one that cost me $1.50 a month to keep alive and I stopped using it. I did it just to keep my old Compuserve email address alive for a bit longer. It took me years to stop that charge once I decided to let it go, but that’s another story. When I finally got to speak to someone who could do the needful she said

Wow! I’ve never seen an account this old!

Was it 17 years? I’ve forgotten now. I’d had an earlier account too, for a few years. Both had 3 digit suffixes, which only older Compuserve addresses did.

It felt slightly like murder.

Email is still in its 30s but real Internet email, with domain names, dates from only 1985. You’d think a web search on world’s oldest email address would yield a result, but it doesn’t. More than a few of the early domains are dead or moribund.

I did find someone wishing his Compuserve email address a happy 22nd birthday a while back and wondering if anyone had an older address. Mine predated it but had been shut down by then.

Sic transit gloria…

(click the play button)

The Economist’s latest cover story is about Russian disillusionment, resentment and hostility to America. Reading it I felt some twinges of nostalgia for the world we left behind before George Bush, when Russians knew that their government lied to them and that things really were better in the west, and the statue of Liberty was a symbol of hope and of freedom for the entire world. It’s easy enough to understand Russian cynicism today. It will take a generation to undo the damage done by the Bush administration (and, as documented by Joseph Stiglitz, by the World Bank).

Russian voters have a lot in common with American Republicans today. They live in a state of managed fear and are persuaded to vote in ways that serve the best interests of a wealthy oligarchy.

Yesterday I finally got to see Michael Moore’s film Sicko. I thought it was one of the best bits of fear-exploding reportage I’ve seen, and in places was very moving — e.g., when New York firefighters visited Cuba to ask at Guantanamo for equal medical treatment with people incarcerated there, only to be ignored and then treated with compassion by “the enemy” in a way that dumbfounded them, reduced them to tears and left them with a very different take on what they had been led to believe.

This is why the world needs journalists.

My own reasons for celebrating America:

• As a nation of immigrants, it represents all humanity more than any other nation.
• It is the most optimistic and forward-looking nation.
• It has been endlessly ingenious in addressing the concept of better customer service as well as profit.

Nobody could go from Europe in the 80s to the US and not be impressed with national 1-800 numbers, UPS, FedEx and guaranteeed next day delivery. I don’t think I heard the words or your money back until I lived in America, where I heard it endlessly. Not just could I order pizza by phone it would be free if not delivered within 30 minutes. At the time this kind of service was simply unheard of in Europe.

There were things I didn’t like, but nothing that was not already the subject of vigorous free speech in America. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that America’s news media were largely inward looking, with the result that the conceptions of the rest of the world held by many Americans were limited.

I got most of my news and comment by radio from Canada. My favourite American journalist was Dan Schorr, whose sonorous cadences on the radio seemed those of a wise elder statesman even then. By chance I just discovered that he is still reporting for National Public Radio at the age of 93! His fine baritone voice is weaker and a little slurred and he is undoubtedly past his reporting best, but hearing him I was pleasantly transported back to a log cabin in the woods in S.E.Ohio in the mid 80s where I often listened to him on a program called All Things Considered.

I now know, from Wikipedia, that his first book was Don’t Get Sick in America and that his parents were Russian.

On this American birthday I tip my hat to Dan Schorr.

In lesser countries he’d have been killed as soon as he became an enemy of the head of state, so in his own way he is evidence of some of America’s better qualities.

I’d like to think he’ll survive long enough to see America become a country in which a citizen could afford to get sick.

Neuromancer was published 25 years ago today.

Here’s a study guide with a plot summary. PC World has reviewed what Gibson got right and wrong (for my money it missed out the iphone/wallet that recognises its owner).

I have yet to read Stephenson’s Snowcrash, which some rate more highly than Cryptonomicon, but overall I think Gibson the better writer.

But … 25 years?! People could grow up in that that time! Speaking of which, today was EMPTY NEST DAY.

• Email
• Web browsing
• “Facebooking”
• Transfering photographs from her phone
• Instant messaging to MSN friends
• Watching DVDs
• Skype

No problem I thought.

Your mother’s old laptop will do fine.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if Compaq Presario 700, a machine with 248Mb of usable RAM, a 20Gb drive, USB v1.0 and no built-in wireless connectivity, came to a bad end overseas. Risk mitigation.

First, I did a fresh install of Ubuntu v9.04.

Ubuntu’s Achilles heel has been wireless communications for a long time but I haven’t had any problems at all with it on my little Asus EEE pc, still running Ubuntu v8.10, so I assumed it had all been fixed.

Wrong!

v9.04 wouldn’t offer WPA or WPA2 security. Worse, this was not a new problem — judging by some of what could  be found via Google. I was a little bit surprised and disappointed. Waiting for the next release or spending time finding a workaround was a non-starter (I”ve paid my dues fooling with NDIS wrappers in the past).

On balance, I thought Linux Mint would be the next best distribution to try (PC LinuxOS would have been my next choice, based on past experience of it just working).

Bingo, the wireless worked perfectly out of the box.

YouTube and DVDs worked as expected, with no extra software required.

Eventually I got around to Skype thinking this would be straightforward. After all, if it works on Ubuntu v8.10 (that’s November 2008) … how hard could it be?

Initially it didn’t work at all. With a little playing around I got it to use the speakers, but the microphone was an insurmountable problem — I was using a headset. It worked, but so badly it might as well not have worked at all.

A separate recorder program worked well, so the problem was the combination of Skype and the hardware (though I later found someone report the same problem using Ekiga).

So…. back to Windows XP.

Thankfully Acronis TrueImage made it fairly painless to restore the last version of Windows. Apart, that is, from the length of time it took to restore 6.6Gb via a USB 1.0 port.

Next: two and half years worth of Windows updates since the last backup.

Elapsed time: about 12 hours to reimage a half-empty 20Gb drive and update Windows.

Roll on cloud computing!

Twenty five years ago today Virgin Atlantic sent its first flight across the Atlantic. This commercial has been running on British TV for some months but, as I rarely see television advertisements, I didn’t see it until I happened to record a programme about the miners’ strike this past weekend and this commercial came at the start of a commercial break.

We missed flying on Virgin, having already flown People Express to the USA when it was launched. 25 years on People Express is long gone and I have yet to fly with Mr.Branson. He furnished an enjoyable textbook example of a dominant business (British Airways) not taking a competitor seriously for entirely the wrong reasons: his having a beard and not wearing a tie, and has kept us amused on and off ever since.

I confess I have never been a conoisseur of women’s shoes. Nor do I believe most heterosexual men could tell to the nearest $100 what any pair of women’s shoes cost. It seems to me that most men’s attitude to footwear for females is puzzlement about the fuss that women make, and that women wear what they think are stylish shoes for themselves and for other women.

That is, until I watched this rather enjoyable advertisement.

Some people were outraged by it and complained to the Advertising Standards Authority and complained that it was sexist and insulting to women. The complaint was dismissed.

Insulting?!

This is I do not understand. Surely, it’s insulting to men to suggest that their mouths hang open and they gawp as soon as soon as some attractive women pass by? Well, never mind. Check out the shoes. This is really an advertisement for shoes, the hottest shoes I’ve ever seen. What makes it so seductive? The colour, the music, the walking in step, the smiles?

Well, it certainly put a smile on my face!

I winced a little when I read Mike Tomasky’s gushing commentary about Obama looking at, no, contemplating a Kandinsky in Paris …. because, he said, you couldn’t imagine George Bush doing it in a bajillion years and wasn’t it wonderful to have a president who wasn’t embarrassing overseas.

Following the link in the comments I looked at the photos on the White House site taken by Obama’s personal photographer — a guy who famously asked him for the job — and I thought the president looked the part, looked completely comfortable in fact, and I felt, again, glad that the world had a mature, thoughtful person doing the job.

Bill Maher’s wake up call, above, is so good I hope Obama sees it. I wonder when Ayatollah Khamenei last saw anything like that? Joking is even held to be unislamic by some scholars (really).

I sent this link about setting up a proxy to some of my Iranian friends and said that I’d be willing to help. What else can one do?

Watching some of the YouTube coverage I was impressed to see videos taken with cellphones which included other people taking videos with cellphones. The days when autocracies could expect to get away with brutal oppression without the world knowing are ending.

I was in the Philippines when Joseph Estrada was ousted by cellphone.

My employer’s mail system came within a hair’s breadth of running out of disk space such was was the explosion in email messages at the end. To the extent that I succeeded in keeping it  up and running I suppose I helped in Estrada’s downfall.

Of course, he was never to be take seriously as a representative of evil. He was just a drunken crook of the lowest sort, but he was elected by the people in the first place. A few years later I had lunch with the bank official whose testimony, in particular, scuttled his presidency and was much impressed by her moral fortitude; the Philippines is a society where journalists are routinely killed with impunity and there is no doubt she risked her life to do what was right.

Iran is very different. I have thought it was a demographic powder keg for years.

Most of the young people I met on my visits, admittedly in Teheran and institutes of higher education, spoke some English — in an accent that I like very much — and they were rather openly critical of the country’s hostile relations with the west, of the religious police and theocratic gerontocracy.

Our driver cum minder kept his cards very close to his chest until one day when I asked him, in the most innocent, non-judgmental way I could, what proportion of women wore the chador on Teheran before the revolution.

He simmered like a volcano, and then said through clenched teeth

There was a lot of very bad dressing before the revolution! VERY  BAD DRESSING!

His manner sent a chill down my back. Then he readjusted his composure and everything was back to normal. Apparently hardly any women wore the chador in Teheran, perhaps 5%.

I thought about the girls I’d seen showing an inch of transparent cuff on their sleeves, risking a beating from the religious police, and wondered what he considered so shocking. I didn’t dare ask.

I did however, politely decline to go along with the suggestions of seemingly every senior male official who, immediately upon introduction, invited me to agree that western media were in the grip of a conspiracy to protray Iran in a negative light.

I was actually expected to say that Iran was completely different from its media image. When I failed to do so a variety of leading questions were asked which I had to shrug off (I don’t watch much TV etc.), but even then there were clearly two Irans not talking to each other.

Back then, more than ten years ago, I was talking to people building the Iranian Internet. That they succeeded despite every possible obstacle being put in their way by the US government is a great achievement.

Stupid US government policy has affected me personally today: I have received a letter from Lloyds Bank in the UK declining to accept payment from an international non-governmental organization in Syria for which I did some work recently. It is, no doubt, trying to keep Uncle Sam sweet. The organization in question is supported in part by the British government.

Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times, makes the case for recession triggering the revolution. Maybe. What triggered the successful revolution in the Philippines was theft, popular outrage, a means of communication and… an army unwilling to open fire on citizens.

In the process of setting up a new PC, my Lenovo X200 laptop, I came across LastPass, a Firefox application for managing passwords and synchronizing them securely across PCs.

At first it seems a little too good to be true. I certainly won’t be entrusting any online banking passwords to it, but for routine use it seems just the ticket. Essentially, it’s a free, cross-browser substitute for RoboForm. Supposedly one’s data, stored on the LastPass server network, is secure as it’s encrypted locally on your PC.

Sure, the NSA can probably crack the AES encrypted file (if it is AES) that can be synced across PCs but never having to worry about a lost password again will be a worthwhile tradeoff for most people.

You can even use it with an iPod or iPhone (YouTube here).

My other good discovery was a free (for me) update to MyLifeOrganized (v3.0).

As these are Windows applications I’ll admit I’m still running Windows, Vista to be exact, on the new laptop. I decided to postpone Windows 7 for now as I had read of too many driver problems with this computer. Haven’t got around to Ubuntu dual boot yet.

Wombat shop

Wandering in Cambridge the other day I came across a shop I’d never heard of: wombatclothing.com (alas, my hasty photo is blurred).

I didn’t think to buy something with the wombat brand for my friend the secret wombat (he pretends he hasn’t come out yet, but he hides in plain sight in the emergency exit row; most wombats are ever ready to dash for the emergency entrance).

Now the Telegraph has printed a photo of naked pinkie wombats we’ll have wombat clothing establishments everywhere, and probably knitting circles popping up all over the UK to help with the wombat orphan crisis.

I’d have visited the rooms of the first author to recognize the importance of wombat guts but it seems they’re only open on Saturday.

Darwin's rooms: closed

This jukebox was sent to me by a friend down under.

Coincidentally, Roads had a wonderfully nostalgic post on Radio Luxembourg not long ago.