Blogging has an interesting aspect. You can very easily hurt someone, quickly, via a nasty comment. Of course, you can take it back, but to what avail?
Let me date myself a bit. Way before e-mail (btw, 'e-mail' being the only certified correct spelling for the concept in the NY Times Book of Style), and way before it's progenitor - MCI Mail - which worked upon a complicated process involving things called DUPs and Flux Capacitors - there was only TELEX and phone calls and regular mail. However, there was a thing called 'talk'.
Now, I want to center in on 'talk'. This was a DEC computer application. OK, I know no one remembers the DEC omputer line, but it once was big-time at almost all universities, not the least of which was New York University, where I was a graduate student. In the student center of computer terminals was a HUGE array of cubicles, each containing a terminal (a very crude terminal by today's standards, a Lear ADM-3A - check it out on eBay), and you would sit there and do your programming. Programming in FORTRAN, COBOL, SNOBOL, Algol-60, whatever. It was perfect.
Now, let's suppose that someone you knew was also in the big room, maybe even miles away - well, not miles away, but certainly aisles away - and you wanted to talk to 'her' - remember, this is Rich writing this.
All you had to do was invoke the 'talk' program, and a little cute window, or pane, would open, into which you could write a line of talk. Immediately, the recipient would see it on 'her' terminal, and could respond.
Now, I have to mention that these were all ASCII-based terminals, and the software sensed every keystoke. It was not like typeing in a line, and then saying 'send', as we do now. EACH time you touched a key, the recipient saw the thing you typed (letter, usually). If you decided to 'erase' whatever you had typed, the recipient actually saw your 'cursor' backing over the thing you wanted to erase.
This is clearly not good.
All communications via computer, intimate or otherwise, are designed to be reconsidered, thought over, deleted, re-drafted, etc. You do not type something into a terminal, and have the other side see it immediately. That might as well be ... speech.
Even text messaging does not allow this to happen.
But, back in the good old days, that was the way it worked.
I made many an enemy that way.
Rich
Monday, July 6, 2009
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