Noted
Viseratops

An excerpt from “The Joy of Handles or EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ME (but have no right to ask)” by Mahatma Kane Jeeves and David Lescohier, Mar 1992:

Andy Warhol said that “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  The computer nets, more than any other medium, lend credibility to this prediction.  A network conference may span the globe more completely than even satellite TV, yet be open to anyone who can afford the simplest computer and modem. Through our participation in conferencing—often without realizing it, and without any contemplation of the implications and possible consequences.

Of course, ordinary participants in network conferencing may never attract quite the attention that other types of celebrities attract. But consider the following, rather less apocalyptic scenarios:

  • On Friday night you post a message to a public conference defending an unpopular or controversial viewpoint.  On Monday morning your biggest client cancels a major contract. Or you are kept up all night by repeated telephone calls from someone demanding that you “stop killing babies”!
  • You buy your teenage son or daughter a computer and modem.  Sometime later you find your lawn littered with beer bottles and dug up with tire marks, or your home vandalized or burglarized.
  • One day you are nominated to the Supreme Court.  Who are all these strange people on TV claiming to be your friends? How did that fellow know your [political] positions?  Your taste in GIFs?

Celebrities and other professional media personalities accept the risks and sacrifices of notoriety, along with the benefits, as part of their chosen careers.  Should computer conference participants be expected to do the same?  And who should be making these decisions?

Source: textfiles.com

Glitch archaeology as captured within the “Johnny Castaway” screensaver (1991, Dynamix).  The attention to detail (and number of submissions on the site) harkens back to an earlier day of fan-driven websites—where even graphical bugs in a cult screensaver were thoroughly documented.

The screensaver itself was the first (and nearly only) of it’s kind—a narrative, story-based animation that took days to fully reveal its’ plot to the viewer.  Thankfully, 20+ years later, this video presents the same story in a rapid-fire 5 minute montage: 

From 1989, a stab at the future of file management: I want to look at hundreds or thousands of files at once, in such a way that—important properties, whatever they are, spring out at me.  Maybe show each file as a small blot, and let the color and shape of the blot reflect whatever properties I’m interested in at the moment: files created more recently than 24 hours ago, files containing calls to “system,” or even object files that are out of date with respect to the source files needed to recreate them. These are all selections I’ve made (or wanted to make) as I went browsing.  In a 3D world, I could imagine having the “interesting” files literally stick out of the mass.  Files as a organically shaped, sized, and colored blots is very interesting, and—I think—something yet unseen. (photo ↬ Michael Scroggins)
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From 1989, a stab at the future of file management:

I want to look at hundreds or thousands of files at once, in such a way that—important properties, whatever they are, spring out at me.  Maybe show each file as a small blot, and let the color and shape of the blot reflect whatever properties I’m interested in at the moment: files created more recently than 24 hours ago, files containing calls to “system,” or even object files that are out of date with respect to the source files needed to recreate them. These are all selections I’ve made (or wanted to make) as I went browsing.  In a 3D world, I could imagine having the “interesting” files literally stick out of the mass. 

Files as a organically shaped, sized, and colored blots is very interesting, and—I think—something yet unseen.

(photo ↬ Michael Scroggins)

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