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Undertoad · 10-04-2001, 10:37 PM

It's been awesome. Truth be told, the weakest time for the whole system was just before the software switchover, which happened just before you arrived. After the switch, I realized that vBulletin was gonna get the job done, and I started to promote it more. "Promote" is the wrong word, but whatever.

The state it got to before the summer slowdown was great. And what's happened in the last three weeks has been just awesome. I'm pretty sure that WTC doesn't have as much to do with the boom in posts, as much as the end of summer. This summer slowdown phenomenon preceded the internet, we've always had it.

The wildest thing that happened was when I posted the "skinning" image of the day, and along comes the girl's MOM who discusses the whole thing with us. Now, I posted in their guestbook, so it wasn't unthinkable that they'd come around and check it out. But still. Then I have a Brazilian image and along comes Count Zero who announces he's from there, and offers another perspective. Excellent!

This sort of thing couldn't happen in the old days. I'm not shocked, this is the net, the IotD is in my Slashdot sig, people post the address and it gets out, and search engines are finding us more and more because we have, obviously, a ton of text available to them. But in the olden days, we had these discussions and they were pretty much guaranteed to be local, since they were always a local call.

The collision of society and technology is my favorite topic, needless to say. A recent news story noted that email is 30 years old. 30. Amongst the educated, at least, email is almost as common as the telephone. But it took a long way to get there, didn't it? Took damn near the whole 30 years.

That's partly because in the olden days, computers simply weren't networked. When I think back to the fact that my college ran off of four PDP-11 systems, 2 for office use and two academic, and the fact that they weren't EVER networked... it boggles the mind. This was 1981-1985. Today we see that an un-networked computer is very dumb indeed; it can hardly do anything. Back in the day, that wasn't understood.

Erm... what was the question again, sonny boy?

10-04-2001, 10:37 PM	#24
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	It's been awesome. Truth be told, the weakest time for the whole system was just before the software switchover, which happened just before you arrived. After the switch, I realized that vBulletin was gonna get the job done, and I started to promote it more. "Promote" is the wrong word, but whatever. The state it got to before the summer slowdown was great. And what's happened in the last three weeks has been just awesome. I'm pretty sure that WTC doesn't have as much to do with the boom in posts, as much as the end of summer. This summer slowdown phenomenon preceded the internet, we've always had it. The wildest thing that happened was when I posted the "skinning" image of the day, and along comes the girl's MOM who discusses the whole thing with us. Now, I posted in their guestbook, so it wasn't unthinkable that they'd come around and check it out. But still. Then I have a Brazilian image and along comes Count Zero who announces he's from there, and offers another perspective. Excellent! This sort of thing couldn't happen in the old days. I'm not shocked, this is the net, the IotD is in my Slashdot sig, people post the address and it gets out, and search engines are finding us more and more because we have, obviously, a ton of text available to them. But in the olden days, we had these discussions and they were pretty much guaranteed to be local, since they were always a local call. The collision of society and technology is my favorite topic, needless to say. A recent news story noted that email is 30 years old. 30. Amongst the educated, at least, email is almost as common as the telephone. But it took a long way to get there, didn't it? Took damn near the whole 30 years. That's partly because in the olden days, computers simply weren't networked. When I think back to the fact that my college ran off of four PDP-11 systems, 2 for office use and two academic, and the fact that they weren't EVER networked... it boggles the mind. This was 1981-1985. Today we see that an un-networked computer is very dumb indeed; it can hardly do anything. Back in the day, that wasn't understood. Erm... what was the question again, sonny boy?