The Computer Chronicles
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2018–2023
26:47 · 544K views · Nov 15, 2012
A 1993 episode of The Computer Chronicles on the early Internet, with guests including Howard Rheingold discussing online community. It is a window into how the internet was seen and what hardware was in use at the time.
Cited as period footage for how people thought about the early internet and 90s computing.
4 comments from Hacker News
> What exactly is the problem with a monoculture? Loss of individuality? Yeah, though I can't say for sure if loss of individuality causes monoculture, or the other way around, or both. In the extreme extrapolation I would we wouldn't even be all the same humans, but simply not humans anymore. More like conduits, marionettes of each other. As for reversing it, I think that begins with the individual, with reclaiming oneself if you will. And that in turn starts with granting oneself the right to do that, wherever one feels comfortable and good about it. By that I mean, just because we're all so deep into something that might have been going on for generations, and can't just instantly "fix" everything, doesn't mean we can't take small steps and consider those meaningful. It's a bit like someone might refrain from using product X for ethical reasons, even though they use a lot of other products with bad ethical implications. So, IMO it starts by rejecting the pervasive idea that little decisions matter. At the least, they always matter for the person making them. We don't have to be "proud" of such decisions, but we should not belittle them either, and should not mind when people belittle them. > Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power. -- Henry George > Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider th
I'd say a post-truth world wouldn't be a world at all so to speak, because if everybody lives in their own filter bubble, with no access to a common world, the public sphere, where humans can have experiences and communicate, ceases to exist. > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- Howard Rheingold, this video > If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. -- Hannah Arendt, Interview with Roger Errera (1974) [LINK]
Watching old videos from the time like the Computer Chronicles, I'm pretty surprised how many people were running OpenStep on Intel hardware. It seems like it really made a dent for a year or two there. Check out the b roll around 5:43 this video And here you can clearly see the login screen on a likely Intel multi core machine, probably from Everex or NCR a similar company this video It's on the right hand side right before they cut it I've started to notice it a bunch in the 1993/94 timeframe. I had no idea. Next I'm going to find a bunch of people using A/UX and BeBoxes. My old bank, Washington Mutual, was using OS/2 until like 2003 ... Why not?
And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold: > You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other. -- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" this video