The Blue Agave Forum: The Blue Agave Forum -> The Mumpsimus Blog

Many technology historians date the origin of the Internet to an experiment conducted by two university students at UCLA – Vinton Cerf and Steven Crocker - on September 2, 1969. They connected two microcomputers by a cable and transmitted data between them, making the first computer network.

Happy belated birthday… by January, 1970, the network had grown to a fulsome three computers!

Others identify it with the commissioning of ARPANET, the US Department of Defence program to create a national network, which was launched in November, 1969. By 1971 it had connected 23 universities and government agencies

And still others peg the date in 1979, when a fledgling company called CompuServe offered the first electronic mail service to personal computer users. Or even January 1983, when ARPANET officially adopted the TCP/IP protocol that’s still in use today.

For most of today’s users, even though the term “Internet” was coined in 1982, the Net began in the mid-1990s, when it became widely available publicly, along with the earliest graphic browsers, like Mosaic.

Milestones aside, the development of the Internet was not a linear process, but rather a synthesis of wildly varying elements of emerging technologies.

Long before the Internet, CompuServe and several...
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The release in August of Doom 3 was one of the most anticipated events in the gaming industry, in part because it had been promised and promised and promised for so long. After four years of development, a lot of industry writers wondered whether it would ever be released.

But the anticipation didn’t sour fans – Doom 3 sold 300,000 copies in its first week alone!

Doom is one of those seminal programs that change the way we do things, in this case gaming. The original Doom was responsible for today’s generation of 3D, virtual-reality first-person-shooters (FPS). First released in 1993, Doom was an instant hit: it was simple, fast, furious and looked like it was played in real 3D.

Well, it was a slick bit of ray-tracing that got that effect, and the game was really in 2D, but who cared? You could play it solo or multiplayer, and the waves of demons, monsters and bad guys never stopped coming.

Within a couple of months, fans had created their own level editors and there were mods being crafted. An entire cottage industry of hackers grew up around Doom.

A year later, Doom II was released, and pretty soon the game was being ported to consoles as well.

In fact, variations of Doom, including new levels, ports and “ultimate” packages continued to be released...
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Since 1977 I've had many, many computers. Starting with a Radio Shack TRS 80, I've owned computers made by Atari, Commodore, Apple, Kaypro, IBM, Sinclair, Texas Instruments, Zenith, Hewlett Packard... and a whole lot of PCs.

As they've aged out of usefulness, I've given quite a few to service clubs which pass them along to places where old machines are still very useful. There is a lot of life left in a 486, if you've never had any computers before it. Not for me, of course, since anything less than a 3-GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM seems positively archaic and cranky.

And the rest went to the big waste bin in the sky. By which I mean they probably ended up in a landfill in some developing nation where they sit today, in pieces, mined for their metals and any salvageable components. But the rest, that mass of non-degradable plastic and glass, those slivers of silicon, glass and toxic metals, are still there.

I didn't realize the problem until quite recently. It's called “ewaste” and it represents one of the most troubling aspects of technology. Old technology is basically hazardous waste, dumped on a handful of Asian nations, who bear the brunt of the poisons and pollution our technology brings.

None of the countries where we dump our ewaste...
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It’s 2 a.m. Do you know where your life is? I obviously don’t. I’ve put in far more late night session in front of the computer of late than I have since I was in my 30s. It’s so easy to get led astray. I was diligently working on my review of Front Page 2003 when I started playing Ubisoft’s FPS (First person Shooter), Far Cry.

Suddenly it’s a week later, my FP review still isn’t complete and I am bone-tired from too many late “just one more level” nights.

What’s compelling about Far Cry isn’t the plot. You are jack Carver, washed up on a deserted jungle island populated with a bunch of mercenaries out for your blood, and run by a group of mad scientists making monsters. Good thing you had special forces training before you became a beach bum. Ho hum…

Throw in a bit of the Island of Dr. Moreau, a bit of Jurassic Park and a good measure of Half Life, leave a lot of weapons and first aid kits lying around the island, make the player fight from checkpoint to checkpoint to get to the next level, and voila: a predictable, linear plot. Must have taken all of 20 minutes to think this one up.

No, what drags me into the game isn’t the plot. It’s the truly astounding game engine, and some pretty fancy AI scripting. The jungle is dense with foliage you can crawl through –...
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Grumble. Grumble. Nothing is simple. Should be able to simply upload and run the damn thing and have it work first time. Instead I waste time tinkering, setting permissions, tweakings skins, checking files... grrrr....

But after what seems more like a difficult intellectual bowel movement than a simple upgrade, it seems to be working... now we'll have to see what IPS hath wrought...

Scuppered with problems - database corrupt, couldn't log in to the admin functions (fortunately I have a sympathetic tech at the server), frustrating not being able to fix something from a distance... but I think it's stable...

Update, 2006: It's difficult to remember how much work this was to get running, how clumsy and awkward I felt. Now, several software generations later, a veteran of a few dozen updtaaes, patches and mod installations, I read this and wonder what all the fuss was about...