Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:28:49 -0500 (EST) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> Subject: [WSFA] Combined reply Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> wrote: > Prior to regular business use of e-mail there generally wasn't any > quoting in replies. Just, "In reference to your letter of March > 22...". Perhaps top posting is supposed to look like stapling a photocopy of the original letter to the reply letter? > Microsoft's mail software has been around since at least the > mid-90s, which is when most businesses started getting access > to the 'net. However, various styles of posting, and of running email lists, had already been thrashed out and debugged. For instance the SF-LOVERS email list which began in 1979. And which became both moderated and digestified in 1980. Or the SPACE list which became the first auto-digestified list in 1982. But before either of them was MSGGROUP in 1975, which made all the classic mistakes, and learned from them so nobody would ever have to repeat them. But then Microsoft and AOL both came along in the 1990s and both repeated all the old mistakes, and refused to learn from anyone. > ... the Web was created in '93... Nitpick: 1991. Though it didn't really catch on until 1992. The net was already over twenty years old at the time. > Prior to that it was mostly universities, the government and > government contractors and generally used Unix, ... Actually, it was mostly TOPS-20, though there were plenty of Unix, MVS, MULTICS, ITS, and other systems. The whole point of the net was to enable incompatible systems to communicate. > I once sent myself mail from my home Fidonet BBS system to the > Arpanet gateway to SPAN to my account at Goddard. Yes, I remember when the ARPAnet (as it was then called) was just one of dozens of networks with completely different protocols which often had one or two sites in common, allowing a sufficiently clever person to send email or files around via obscure and convoluted paths. Email addresses were often bizarrely punctuated with a hodgepodge of at signs, percent signs, hyphens, and exclamation points -- as much a routing map as a true address. > Took about an hour to arrive, ... Usenet was one of those separate nets in those days. And some outlying sites got their Usenet feed via overnight magtapes. > This stuff is still pretty new really.... True, though not quite as new as most people think. > I also keep wondering what "hobbiest" means..."the most hobby"? Well, I know an "athiest" is someone who doesn't believe in a "diety". > I've never seen a honing pigeon, ... If you ever see one, try to catch it with some duck tape. > or maybe the guy is just planning to sharpen his wit before getting > to it? Or to wet his appetite. > ... usually back-quote marks, ... But those *are* part of standard ASCII. Character 96, right between underscore and lowercase "a". (I used to "type" using a manual hole punch on paper tape.) > If you want to do searches to read more about this you could start > with hunting down "UTF-8". I know all about that. One of the SMOFcon time travel forms had some Japanese writing on it, and it will be appearing as such in the WSFA Journal. > Back when it was just ASCII and EBCDIC it was pretty simple... Not really, since there were several incompatible versions of EBCDIC, several incompatible eight-bit extensions of ASCII, and several other unrelated codes of various bit lengths from 5 to 12, including Correspondence, 026 Hollerith, 029 Hollerith, Baudot, and Murray. For starters. Not to mention that even seven-bit ASCII has changed. Character 95 used to be left-pointing-arrow, not underscore. And 94 used to be up-pointing-arrow, not caret. Then there's Morse code, which has the advantage of being human readable. In 110 bps days, I had the remote system send alternate NULs and DELs in patterns to spell things out in Morse. That way I only needed the typing side of a terminal and modem, not the receiving and displaying side. > It also couldn't handle Arabic, Chinese, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, > and other non-phonecian-based characters at all. Not to mention Runes, Tengwar, and Voynich. It's a wonder we could communicate at all. > Without accents, umlauts, etc. in some languages you can't write > certain words, as without those the words become different words. Conversely, in Unicode some very different characters look identical, and "phishers" have used this to trick people into going to sites that look exactly like "citibank.com" or whatever, except that it actually starts with some a Sinhalese character that looks exactly like an ordinary "c" or something. > Hence the proliferation of character sets, some multi-byte to handle > non-alphabetic languages like Chinese where you have thousands of > "characters" to deal with. Never mind Chinese, what I really want is "Heptapod-B" (from Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life" -- one of the best stories of the past decade). Learning that script has some interesting side effects.