My first experiences in serious computing were on multiuser VMS, AIX and Red Hat systems. I really miss the camaraderie and interactive features of those setups.
Strikes me that Web 2.0 is really about cloning that kind of functionality - more prettily, but as yet more clumsily - for a wider audience.
(Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard just about the time they were migrating from AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging functionality in the process. Essentially he cloned parts of it again in a new interface.)
"AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging functionality in the process."
what does that even mean? You mean using bash over ssh and checking email using elm et al? And what's all the status and messaging functionality that was lost?
web based email was available when Zuck was learning his ABCs...
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. That's what my college used in the late 90's/early 2000's, even though web mail had been available for a while, and I know Harvard did too. The lost functionality was mostly finger. Some people still used talk as well, although AIM/ICQ had mostly taken over that space.
Kids used to spend hours updating their .plan and .project files, finger'ing other people, etc. the same way they now spend hours messing around with Facebook and Twitter. That was lost with the move to web mail, and then social networks stepped in to fill the void.
The differences are mainly that a) the newer tools allow for richer media, not just text b) status updates are viewable in a timeline rather than being destructive overwrites, but c) they still aren't as well integrated imho as unix email/finger/talk.
Strikes me that Web 2.0 is really about cloning that kind of functionality - more prettily, but as yet more clumsily - for a wider audience.
(Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard just about the time they were migrating from AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging functionality in the process. Essentially he cloned parts of it again in a new interface.)