Another dimesion of Internet Values

[Sivasubramanian M]

In the early years of the Internet, there was a certain degree of simplicity with the way people connected and interacted with one another; Perhaps it was not only "simplicity" but also "openness" and "receptiveness" and a certain degree of trust. 

As in the very early days of telephone when an incoming call was respected and eagerly answered, during the early years of the Internet, any one could find most email addresses, and any one of any importance and stature responded to most email messages, sort of without a fuss. There was anonymity as in a bulletin board or Graigslist, yet within the cloud of anonymity, the quality of interactions were good. 

What has changed now? We have facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and with these new avtaars of applications of the  bulletin board kind, does that simplicity and openness and receptiveness and trust prevail in the same measure? 

Excluding the factor of exponential increase in the number of users, are there other factors that have altered the Internet experience and what can be identifies as the underlying values that characterized interactions? 

I have mentioned, for a start, "simplicity" etc, but what do the early users of the Internet remember?

 Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

sender

[Joly MacFie]

Hi Siva,

I thought danah boyd did a good job of bringing perspective to this in her recent OII talk

https://isoclive.substack.com/p/oii-danah

One thing she introduced was the idea of "friction"

boyd devoted significant attention to the concept of friction. In both technical and legal systems, friction slows processes down, exposes risks, creates opportunities for accountability, and can function as resistance to harmful acceleration. She criticized contemporary AI discourse for treating all friction as inefficiency to be eliminated.

In contrast, she argued that the Internet’s historical resilience often depended on friction and adaptability rather than speed and optimization. The current push toward frictionless AI deployment risks destabilizing systems by removing safeguards and amplifying vulnerabilities.

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365 

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[Iria Puyosa]

Iria Puyosa reacted to your message:

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From: coreinter...@googlegroups.com <coreinter...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Joly MacFie <jo...@punkcast.com>
Sent: Monday, 22 June 2026 20:29:51
To: coreinter...@googlegroups.com <coreinter...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CoreInternetValues] Another dimesion of Internet Values

 

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[Sivasubramanian M]

Thank you Joly. That is very pertinent and Boyd's argument is valid.  

You are among the earliest to have become part of the Internet.  What was the  Internet like,  in the 70s and 80s?

 Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

sender

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[Alejandro Pisanty]

Joly,

thanks - good to read this from hannah. As you might remember I use a framework to explain Internet stuff to people by mapping it to their offline or pre-Internet correlates, then reassemble for better action capabilities re e.g. legislation. The 6 factors in it are scaling, identity, jurisdiction, barriers, friction and memory. 

As it happens, it often is friction that it's easier to act upon. The Internet has been reducing and removing friction all over, which gives us so many one-click opportunities for good but also mischief, and (re-) introducing friction is closest to hand to fix things like phishing (not that it solves it structurally, but it gives people, banks, retailers, online services etc. a handle.) An extension of this is coming soon.

Alejandro Pisanty

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/coreinternetvalues/CAM9VJk0ZYSPBDu7HH3629gDT5-6hA6NxL6ddpdwEvKL-2WXpCQ%40mail.gmail.com.

--

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
     Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
Facultad de Química UNAM
Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
+525541444475
Blog: http://pisanty.blogspot.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pisanty
Unete al grupo UNAM en LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/22285/4A106C0C8614
Twitter: http://twitter.com/apisanty
---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, http://www.isoc.org
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

[Alejandro Pisanty]

(correction: danah)

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 2:30 PM Joly MacFie <jo...@punkcast.com> wrote:

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[Joly MacFie]

Hi Siva,

Thanks for asking, although you'll probably wish you hadn't!

Although I benefitted from Internet enabled tech in the 80s,, such as email, I arrived in 1994  , like many others, when Trumpet Winsock's release, coincided with 486 gen PCs, enabling access to the WWW, ftp, gopher, etc.

But, in the 70s, I was involved in the pre-Internet social network known as punk rock, some what precipated by the arrival of primary transport layers, xerox and cheap litho, plus a glut of cassette duplicators. Previous to that, duplication of any media was an expensive and convoluted process. I happened into it a ground level when I formed Better Badges in the UK, to sell badges (aka pinback buttons) at weekly rock shows in London, with the ethos "Image as virus. Elitism for all." and the idea that badges, rather than being a tool of promotion for the establishment, be a backdoor social activity. By happy coincidence. Cheap reprographics that allowed me to be flexiable and creative, also enabled a generation of small DIY publications that became known as fanzines. 

After an initial gestatory period, the whole thing took off to become a global phenomenon.  Lapels became the social media platform of the day.

 One obvious issue would be copyright. In the early days I tried to maintain some kind of royalty system, but it proved impractical to admin, and unaffordable. More to the point, nobody cared much. The bands that fans supported, welcomed the support. It was P2P.  There came a crucial moment where I dispensed with royalties, and just offered free set up and some badges for new designs. This was crucial friction remover.

 By 1979, I was selling 10k badges a week, had bought 3 printing presses, and had a dozen staff. I also set up a walk in 'Tape Department"  that could dupe a C-90 in 3 minutes. We had a library of all 'Peel sessions'' - live band recordings and other demos and mix tapes that were made available some of our wholesale buyers for instore play.

A problem was that badges had become a "fad". Now I had competition and badge stands were poping up on every corner, with gaudy rubbish. So, another crux. In order that my badges continue to be a cool underground medium, and, since I had spare capacity. I started printing fanzines. The economics were vastly different. One A4 sheet could have 20+ badges, but one fanzine needed 10+ sheets printed double-sided, and yet it sold for the same price! There's a vital truth there -- content may be king, but relationships rule! As I sometimes say...

An examplar of this truth was a band called Adam and the Ants. In 1980 he was a cult favorite with the punks and I was selling maybe 5k badges a week on him alone, while he had practically zero record sales. He bacame an overnight pop star, and my sales plummeted to almost zero!

I brought the same knid of deal to the fanzines as badges. You brought it in. It got published, and you got to pay a discounted rate for any you took, and the rest were distributed. Of course takers were many and varied. At least one of them, fashion Zine i-D, is still going today, now owned by Karlie Kloss! However, foreshadowing danah boyd's point, I did come under criticism for making the process too easy, and homogenising the medium. This thinking eventually developed into what in the 80s was known as the DIY-ethic.

By the early 80s I myself ran into problems. Cash-flow issues, when an investor backed out, And punk rock had become somewhat passe,  mindless, or commercialized.   

At the same time, I had a Commodore Vic-20, a 300 baud modem, and was experimenting with BBS's. I had the big realization that, if we did fanzines online, it would dispense with the piles of zines now cluttering my basement. I conceived the idea 'User-Promotion", and "What's UP?" as a new handle for online activity.

Now in the UK, this whole process was inhibited by the fact that, unlike the USA where local calls were toll-free, using a modem was an expensive business. One of my best customers was Zed Records of Long Beach, California. This was where the BBS business was booming! I made the decison to sell the badge business to the a co-op of the staff, and, escaping some serious financial liabilities, remove myself to the West Coast!

However, when I got there, what I discovered was 1) punk rock was just becoming big, however 2) there was nothing punk rock about the BBS scene. The main host was something called 'The Well' in San Francisco, who's motto was 'You own your own words"  which, while at first glance empowered its users, I rapidly found meant jealous propietorship of ideas, very much at odds with the egalitarian P2P nature of punk. Some there became Silicon Valley moguls. I was put off.

In the meantime, I got a job as Chief Dogsbody for Los Angeles premiere punk rock promote Goldenvoice (now runs Coachella), and for a couple of years used my UK connections and graphic skills to take it to a next level. What I learnt there was, that as far as the USA went, TV was the only medium that mattered.

Thus, in 1986, moved to NYC, graduated to a portable C64, I set about utilizing TV. And this is where the Internet comes in. I had a colleague in the UK Jihn Loder, who, had a recording studio and record distro. Back in the day we worked closely. He offered the same kind of frictionless deal as I did for badges and zines, for DIY records. He spotted the studio time, manufactured, distro'd, and you got a discount so you could distro yourself. He had come to LA with one of his bands, we had discussed TV, and he volunteered he was setting up a tv studio. When I got to NYC we set up communications using Western Union Easylink. which meant daily discussion with no transatlantic phone calls.

The fact is that the UK record business was then busily internationalizing using Telex as the prime method of  reachng customers, so Easylink was a natural adoption, since every Telex machine has an Easylink email address,  Thanks, as I later learned to the efforts of Vint and colleagues, these emails could actually be addressed, as could Compuserve (very popular at the time) by using one provider - MCI Mail. Mind you it wasn't free, $35/year, and maybe $1 an email (for $2 one could get a paper delivery to any US Address!)

John and I used this link to set up SNUB TV, a fortnightly new music show on USA Cable that featured new UK content not available on MTV. I had the telex / emails of every indie record distributor, and more, and would spam them remorselessly with program notes before the show went out, so they would be prepped with stock. We had good Nielsens, and ran three good seasons

But, at the same time, my efforts to create some online equivalent of fanzines was pretty futile. I had a newsletter "What's Up", which i spammed out via MCI Mail, with little response, except notably, after one particularly juicy edition, I got a response from Woz, saying it was "the best thing to ever pop out of his computer" or similar.

I went back to selling badges at NYC shows to survive! But, having learnt my lesson, I did not expand. The DIY ethic.

Around 1991 I was able to obtain an Amiga. But still, the media capability was primitive. I did learn to digitize audio,

So, it wasn't until 1994, as mentioned, with a little inherited cash, I was able to get a 486 laptop, and install something called 'Netcruiser', which gave me Internet access at 14.4kbps. Immediately I could see that the WWW enabled the vision that I had had only a dozen or so years earlier!

Meanwhile, my friend John in the UK had got himself a Sun Sparc and set up an httpd server so we were off! The very first web pages i did were html encoding a friend's newsletter called 'MediaEater' on that server.

Soon I had an ISP account and started posting content. Being a little slow off my feet I just missed snagging whatsup.com, so had to settle for wwwhatsup.com, I did a website for the band 'Bad Brains' which made it to the NCSA What's New list, which was a big deal!

What was revelatory to me, at that time, was the fact that one could use graphic elements from other sites, just by embedding them! This seemed to throw the entire "You own your own" thing on its head, since no copying per se was involved. I started an 'Item of the Day' linkblog, where every item had an embed. It's interesting to see how many of the embeds survive!

The next thing was to put the NYC badges, now known as "pins" online. Hence https://pinstand.com - Since this was essentially the only online punk rock at the time, it garnered healthy trafic, and my po box would fill with money orders and cash, before PayPal ever showed up. I had a full time employee fulfilling orders.I used to spend many hours scouring the web using Yahoo, Alta Vista etc, to add links to the pin pages. Very enjoyable.

Exploring online, I discovered the Internet Society, which, as they say in punk rock, supports the scene. I coughed up the $75 annual fee. BTW, at this time I was using ISDN for Internet access, which was a 2x56k phone line system that cost around $500/mth!

A big developement in the mid 90s was the advent of Real Networks, first with RealAudio and then RealVideo. ALthough media was previously available in some formats, files were too big for the curent 28.8 dial up speeds, plus players were piecemeal. Real Audio changed that, with ubiquitous client and format, programmable playlists that progressively downloaded as they played, etc. So, yes, another degree of friction removed.

In September 1997, another colleague John Bentham, who had a punk video company in the UK, brought a band he managed to play NYC. I suggested to him that we might put the sow online. He was very excited about the prospect of a live webcast. I apatiently expalined to him, that the whole point of the Internet was that media be on-demand beyond time constraints, which he understood. Thus http://punkcast.com was born. 

One bee in the bonnet that I had at the time was that the music business had set about the Internet in a heavy handed way overloading their content with cruft and junk. Meanwhile fans were beginning to set up ftp repositories that had bare bones but comprehensive and accessible content. So, it was my idea that Punkcast would emulate the latter rather than the former. If you look at PUNKCAST #1 you can see this in action. Note RealVideo is still in the future, so video is 160x120 MPEG at 112kbps.

A year later, September 98, PUNKCAST #8. I have mastered html tables, and RealVodeo has arrived. Video is offered as 44kbps or 200kbps. It was this show that convinced me to buy a camera of my own.

Once I had my own camera, I started looking around for other stuff to shoot. I had joined ISOC_NY, the local Internet Society Chapter, and so, when I saw they had scheduled a talk for May 10, 1999, entitled 'Do people own their ideas?', I was there, camera in hand. I asked the presenter Prof. Robert Dewar for permission to shoot. "Oh sure, I am sure my wife would like to see it." He said. This was a spirited presentation that started with an actor dressed as Thomas Jefferson giving the famous quote: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."  So, I promptly posted a clip as PUNKCAST #14 . To my surprise this resulted in a chorus of protest! First the Prof. saying he had not imagined that the video would be online, and then the then president of the Chapter saying 'How dare you!' etc. Eventually, calm ensued, and the Prof. admitted he had learnt his lesson i.e. that he coulda / shoulda qualified his permission. Apparently his real concern was that he made "forward-looking" statements, that might affect some commercial project. But, the episode reflects that he had not understood, in 1999, how little friction there was between a  camera, and global availability.

Later that year ISOC-NY invited me to shoot Vint Cerf at NYU - 'The Internet: Past, Preseent & Future". I was impressed how explicitly Vint verbally gave permission for "All uses, in perpetuity". He clearly understood what the good Professor had not! A clip from that talk "How the Internet works, in 5 minutes" graced ISOC-NY's front page for some years.

:)

Joly

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[Dr. Alejandro Pisanty Baruch]

Joly,

thanks a lot for this - I hesitate to write "Story" - piece of history! A total hero's journey. 

My first use of the Internet took place when it wasn't even called that way; it was ARPANET, some time in 1977 or 1979, when I attended a workshop on methods in Quantum Chemistry at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. It was the seat of the Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange, a heroic effort that held the codes and could share them in tapes or punched cards, mostly FORTRAN. For the workshop we were able to use computers in Livermore and a few other places across the US over that network and it was totally eye-opening even for researchers from well equipped universities like Purdue. 

I made my first (successful) Internet prediction at the time. A student from another university in the US told us they were handed Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminals (like a small typewriter with thermal paper and a couple of plastic donuts to connect to a phone for the modem/data link) to take to their dorms. I said "having a computer on your bedside table can ruin your family and social life even if you live alone."

I went on to meet the network again around 1985 in Stuttgart, Germany, where we got access to BITNET, plus data links to a Cray in Munich. Back in Mexico in 1986 I was part of the push for supercomputing (eventually a Cray Y-MP in 1991) and the Internet, first BITNET. Gopher was a killer app that made many of my colleagues run their own cables to their labs to connect. I ended up later overseeing the growth of UNAM online, distance-education operations, the Internet 2 consortium of Mexico, and some more stuff. 

To Siva's question re simplicity, I still deplore the loss of pine and the text interface to email... it was so efficient, fast, and transparent. Yes, no MIME, no HTML, just words... and a zip to use, read, file, search and clean up.

Alejandro Pisanty

---

De: coreinter...@googlegroups.com <coreinter...@googlegroups.com> en nombre de Joly MacFie <jo...@punkcast.com>
Enviado: martes, 23 de junio de 2026 03:47 a. m.
Para: coreinter...@googlegroups.com
Asunto: Re: [CoreInternetValues] Another dimesion of Internet Values

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/coreinternetvalues/CAM9VJk1s%2BNDQnv7C1C5098XJpeCNrp2dbnrqMhDULUNN5OqtSg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sivasubramanian Muthusamy]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 3:18 PM Joly MacFie <jo...@punkcast.com> wrote:

Hi Siva,

Thanks for asking, although you'll probably wish you hadn't!

Although I benefitted from Internet enabled tech in the 80s,, such as email, I arrived in 1994  , like many others, when Trumpet Winsock's release, coincided with 486 gen PCs, enabling access to the WWW, ftp, gopher, etc.

My first exposure to the Internet was on a day's visit without any purpose to one of my classmates in the University of Arizona during 1991; I saw the boys engaged in unrestrained user group (friendly and not-so-friendly) 'cultural' chat exchanges between one culture and another, with plenty of spirit and excitement in the library, where there were Macs, one of which was set up by my friend to introduce me to Paintbrush !  What I could understand looking back, was that they were all on nick names, but it might not have been difficult for anyone with technical expertise to identify originating and destination networks? and that in a true sense, especially in a University network, they weren't really anonymous. 

# It would be more interesting to hear about the Internet in the late 70s and 80s, more than what you have written below about BBS etc, more about the Internet before www, the Internet before the browser, the Internet of Jon Postel's era wherein you registered a domain name by sending an email to Jon Postel, or obtained an IP allocation by sending him a post card ! (might not have been as simple as that, I am exaggerating, of course).   Who might be able to tell us more about those days ??? 

 

But, in the 70s, I was involved in the pre-Internet social network known as punk rock, some what precipated by the arrival of primary transport layers, xerox and cheap litho, plus a glut of cassette duplicators. Previous to that, duplication of any media was an expensive and convoluted process. I happened into it a ground level when I formed Better Badges in the UK, to sell badges (aka pinback buttons) at weekly rock shows in London, with the ethos "Image as virus. Elitism for all." and the idea that badges, rather than being a tool of promotion for the establishment, be a backdoor social activity. By happy coincidence. Cheap reprographics that allowed me to be flexiable and creative, also enabled a generation of small DIY publications that became known as fanzines. 

After an initial gestatory period, the whole thing took off to become a global phenomenon.  Lapels became the social media platform of the day.

 One obvious issue would be copyright. In the early days I tried to maintain some kind of royalty system, but it proved impractical to admin, and unaffordable. More to the point, nobody cared much. The bands that fans supported, welcomed the support. It was P2P.  There came a crucial moment where I dispensed with royalties, and just offered free set up and some badges for new designs. This was crucial friction remover.

 By 1979, I was selling 10k badges a week,

Interesting !  You dropped your concerns about copyright with the result that you scaled ! 

 

had bought 3 printing presses, and had a dozen staff. I also set up a walk in 'Tape Department"  that could dupe a C-90 in 3 minutes. We had a library of all 'Peel sessions'' - live band recordings and other demos and mix tapes that were made available some of our wholesale buyers for instore play.

A problem was that badges had become a "fad". Now I had competition and badge stands were poping up on every corner, with gaudy rubbish. So, another crux. In order that my badges continue to be a cool underground medium, and, since I had spare capacity. I started printing fanzines. The economics were vastly different. One A4 sheet could have 20+ badges, but one fanzine needed 10+ sheets printed double-sided, and yet it sold for the same price! There's a vital truth there -- content may be king, but relationships rule! As I sometimes say...

An examplar of this truth was a band called Adam and the Ants. In 1980 he was a cult favorite with the punks and I was selling maybe 5k badges a week on him alone, while he had practically zero record sales. He bacame an overnight pop star, and my sales plummeted to almost zero!

I brought the same knid of deal to the fanzines as badges. You brought it in. It got published, and you got to pay a discounted rate for any you took, and the rest were distributed. Of course takers were many and varied. At least one of them, fashion Zine i-D, is still going today, now owned by Karlie Kloss! However, foreshadowing danah boyd's point, I did come under criticism for making the process too easy, and homogenising the medium. This thinking eventually developed into what in the 80s was known as the DIY-ethic.

By the early 80s I myself ran into problems. Cash-flow issues, when an investor backed out, And punk rock had become somewhat passe,  mindless, or commercialized.   

At the same time, I had a Commodore Vic-20, a 300 baud modem, and was experimenting with BBS's. I had the big realization that, if we did fanzines online, it would dispense with the piles of zines now cluttering my basement. I conceived the idea 'User-Promotion", and "What's UP?" as a new handle for online activity.

I wish What's UP scaled to be the Whatsapp as we know it :(  Please say more about the BBS's.  Did everyone on a BB have a handle of some kind?  Was there anyone present with a name and surname and a street address? Or, was it considered unconventional or unsafe to reveal one's natural identity?

Now in the UK, this whole process was inhibited by the fact that, unlike the USA where local calls were toll-free, using a modem was an expensive business. One of my best customers was Zed Records of Long Beach, California. This was where the BBS business was booming! I made the decison to sell the badge business to the a co-op of the staff, and, escaping some serious financial liabilities, remove myself to the West Coast!

However, when I got there, what I discovered was 1) punk rock was just becoming big, however 2) there was nothing punk rock about the BBS scene. The main host was something called 'The Well' in San Francisco, who's motto was 'You own your own words"  which, while at first glance empowered its users, I rapidly found meant jealous propietorship of ideas, very much at odds with the egalitarian P2P nature of punk. Some there became Silicon Valley moguls. I was put off.

In the meantime, I got a job as Chief Dogsbody for Los Angeles premiere punk rock promote Goldenvoice (now runs Coachella), and for a couple of years used my UK connections and graphic skills to take it to a next level. What I learnt there was, that as far as the USA went, TV was the only medium that mattered.

Thus, in 1986, moved to NYC, graduated to a portable C64, I set about utilizing TV. And this is where the Internet comes in. I had a colleague in the UK Jihn Loder, who, had a recording studio and record distro. Back in the day we worked closely. He offered the same kind of frictionless deal as I did for badges and zines, for DIY records. He spotted the studio time, manufactured, distro'd, and you got a discount so you could distro yourself. He had come to LA with one of his bands, we had discussed TV, and he volunteered he was setting up a tv studio. When I got to NYC we set up communications using Western Union Easylink. which meant daily discussion with no transatlantic phone calls.

The fact is that the UK record business was then busily internationalizing using Telex as the prime method of  reachng customers, so Easylink was a natural adoption, since every Telex machine has an Easylink email address,  Thanks, as I later learned to the efforts of Vint and colleagues, these emails could actually be addressed, as could Compuserve (very popular at the time) by using one provider - MCI Mail. Mind you it wasn't free, $35/year, and maybe $1 an email (for $2 one could get a paper delivery to any US Address!)

John and I used this link to set up SNUB TV, a fortnightly new music show on USA Cable that featured new UK content not available on MTV. I had the telex / emails of every indie record distributor, and more, and would spam them remorselessly with program notes before the show went out, so they would be prepped with stock. We had good Nielsens, and ran three good seasons

But, at the same time, my efforts to create some online equivalent of fanzines was pretty futile. I had a newsletter "What's Up", which i spammed out via MCI Mail, with little response, except notably, after one particularly juicy edition, I got a response from Woz, saying it was "the best thing to ever pop out of his computer" or similar.

I went back to selling badges at NYC shows to survive! But, having learnt my lesson, I did not expand. The DIY ethic.

Around 1991 I was able to obtain an Amiga. But still, the media capability was primitive. I did learn to digitize audio,

From around 64KB of memory of C64 to around whopping 1 MB of Memory of Amiga ! you must have felt rich and powerful :)

 

So, it wasn't until 1994, as mentioned, with a little inherited cash, I was able to get a 486 laptop, and install something called 'Netcruiser', which gave me Internet access at 14.4kbps. Immediately I could see that the WWW enabled the vision that I had had only a dozen or so years earlier!

Meanwhile, my friend John in the UK had got himself a Sun Sparc and set up an httpd server so we were off! The very first web pages i did were html encoding a friend's newsletter called 'MediaEater' on that server.

Soon I had an ISP account and started posting content. Being a little slow off my feet I just missed snagging whatsup.com, so had to settle for wwwhatsup.com, I did a website for the band 'Bad Brains' which made it to the NCSA What's New list, which was a big deal!

What's New looks like a early Internet directory of sorts. Yahoo and Lycos probably were similar, with more numerous listings ?   (Please, please Joly, feature a link to my email address or X in wwwhatsup.com, it feels like a part of Internet history ! )

 

What was revelatory to me, at that time, was the fact that one could use graphic elements from other sites, just by embedding them! This seemed to throw the entire "You own your own" thing on its head, since no copying per se was involved. I started an 'Item of the Day' linkblog, where every item had an embed. It's interesting to see how many of the embeds survive!

Wasn't that what Berners-Lee would have approved of?  The ability to copy across www ?  

The next thing was to put the NYC badges, now known as "pins" online. Hence https://pinstand.com - Since this was essentially the only online punk rock at the time, it garnered healthy trafic, and my po box would fill with money orders and cash, before PayPal ever showed up. I had a full time employee fulfilling orders.I used to spend many hours scouring the web using Yahoo, Alta Vista etc, to add links to the pin pages. Very enjoyable.

Exploring online, I discovered the Internet Society, which, as they say in punk rock, supports the scene. I coughed up the $75 annual fee. BTW, at this time I was using ISDN for Internet access, which was a 2x56k phone line system that cost around $500/mth!

A big developement in the mid 90s was the advent of Real Networks, first with RealAudio and then RealVideo. ALthough media was previously available in some formats, files were too big for the curent 28.8 dial up speeds, plus players were piecemeal. Real Audio changed that, with ubiquitous client and format, programmable playlists that progressively downloaded as they played, etc. So, yes, another degree of friction removed.

In September 1997, another colleague John Bentham, who had a punk video company in the UK, brought a band he managed to play NYC. I suggested to him that we might put the sow online. He was very excited about the prospect of a live webcast. I apatiently expalined to him, that the whole point of the Internet was that media be on-demand beyond time constraints, which he understood. Thus http://punkcast.com was born. 

One bee in the bonnet that I had at the time was that the music business had set about the Internet in a heavy handed way overloading their content with cruft and junk. Meanwhile fans were beginning to set up ftp repositories that had bare bones but comprehensive and accessible content. So, it was my idea that Punkcast would emulate the latter rather than the former. If you look at PUNKCAST #1 you can see this in action. Note RealVideo is still in the future, so video is 160x120 MPEG at 112kbps.

A year later, September 98, PUNKCAST #8. I have mastered html tables, and RealVodeo has arrived. Video is offered as 44kbps or 200kbps. It was this show that convinced me to buy a camera of my own.

Once I had my own camera, I started looking around for other stuff to shoot. I had joined ISOC_NY, the local Internet Society Chapter, and so, when I saw they had scheduled a talk for May 10, 1999, entitled 'Do people own their ideas?', I was there, camera in hand. I asked the presenter Prof. Robert Dewar for permission to shoot. "Oh sure, I am sure my wife would like to see it." He said. This was a spirited presentation that started with an actor dressed as Thomas Jefferson giving the famous quote: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."  So, I promptly posted a clip as PUNKCAST #14 . To my surprise this resulted in a chorus of protest! First the Prof. saying he had not imagined that the video would be online, and then the then president of the Chapter saying 'How dare you!' etc. Eventually, calm ensued, and the Prof. admitted he had learnt his lesson i.e. that he coulda / shoulda qualified his permission. Apparently his real concern was that he made "forward-looking" statements, that might affect some commercial project. But, the episode reflects that he had not understood, in 1999, how little friction there was between a  camera, and global availability.

Later that year ISOC-NY invited me to shoot Vint Cerf at NYU - 'The Internet: Past, Preseent & Future". I was impressed how explicitly Vint verbally gave permission for "All uses, in perpetuity". He clearly understood what the good Professor had not! A clip from that talk "How the Internet works, in 5 minutes" graced ISOC-NY's front page for some years.

Vint's values are echoed by Tim Berner's Lee who says ""I was seized by the idea of combining two pre-existing computer technologies: the internet and hypertext, which takes an ordinary document and brings it to life by adding “links”. I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it." 

 

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Sivasubramanian M

Nameshop

India.

Inte...@nameshop.in

[Sivan]

Thank you Alejando. I replied to Joly moments ago. Please say some more about BITNET, CSNET and CREN.  Before Bitnet, between 1972 and 81 how did the ARPANET branch off?

Were you on Compuserve or AOL? What was it like?

Thankyou.

 Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

sender

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[Joly MacFie]

Hi Siva,

If you are interested in BBS;s, I would point you at Jason Scott's documentary

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE

Joly

[Alejandro Pisanty]

S,

there are two parts to the answer. One is "go to the history books", re BITNET and much my (and Joly's) reply didn't cover. I notice you are already probing the Internet-history list. 

The other part is: in the academic environment we had access to better connectivity than outside, and also to terminals and computers. The interfaces were simple, all text, terminals mostly monochromatic, green or white on black, IBM's an amber color of text. Applications were equally rudimentary from today's point of view. When connectivity became available to the home and small businesses things were a bit better but OTOH connections were slow, intermittent, unstable and expensive. It all took a lot of patience.

Alejandro Pisanty

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