AntiWar.com linked to blog posts frequently, that's how I discovered the Blogosphere. Through the anti-war connection (the anti-war libertarians had no qualms about linking even to commies like Lenin's Tomb), I found blogs closer to my political preferences.
So, one I stuck with was Billmon's The Whiskey Bar. When Billmon pulled the plug on comments, The Moon of Alabama was founded, so I looked in some times.
Meanwhile, I was searching for a blog discussing matters beyond the Anglo world, one for European and EU issues. Via some leftist blogs, I found A Fistful of Euros. That blog has a decent coverage of Europe and a civil tone, but I found most writers too uncritical of the economic consensus, and felt as if most writers are US or British expats with decidedly standard Anglo views. [I must stress I don't know how true my perceptions have been, and may well have been well off; for example one expat whose views of the host country seemed clearly upper-class English to me turned out to be Irish.]
So, it was on these two blogs that I saw links to ET in few months after it was founded. The need for registration and the dominance of economic issues kept me off at first, but eventually I registered -- and the rest is history. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Oh, and myself, who decided around the same time that neoliberalism became too intolerable to stay in the cozy waters of social liberalism and that Marxist class-war rhetoric suddenly made sense, had no qualms about reading stuff by these rightists. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I was already on a local BBS by then. The level of conversation was not high, but I did meet some eccentric people.
The Internet arrived, via the incredibly unprofessional Demon ISP, as was, in 1994. I found USENET - I remember grinning disturbingly as I watched the complete list of newsgroups downloading - but with a handful of exceptions USENET mostly seemed full of noise, flamefests and disturbed people.
The web arrived not long after. I was writing magazine features telling people they'd soon (for very approximate values of soon) be able to chat around the world and download music and videos without having to buy them on disk.
This was 1994. Not much happened, blog wise, for about a decade, apart from an embarrassing stint on some of the wackier communities on AOL, which I'd rather forget.
I was almost completely apoliticial until the Bush election. I had the usual middle class very vague leftish sympathies, but that was about as far as it went. Politics and economics weren't something I spent a lot of time on.
Then after Bush I spent some time on a Situationist mailing list, out of curiosity. Which is where I was when 9/11 happened, and which made me more aware that politically, things were not as they should be.
In 2005, while watching the Katrin coverage, I found dKos, which impressed me with high quality writing and first hand accounts of what was happening. Somehow that led to ET. I looked at it briefly, thought it seemed rather dull, and then forgot it.
I came back a few months later for another look, and it seemed more interesting.
And here we are.
-- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
The computer itself, IBM PC XT ( 28KB Memory, one 10MB drive) would have cost you $3776.00. These are academic discount prices...
In 1991, my mid-level firm having being swallowed by one of the Big 6, everything was computerised, including audit. But the partners decided to buy six suitcase-sized laptops to be shared between around 200 people. We had to work by hand during the day, then do shifts in the evening, copying our work onto the laptops, each machine visiting as many as three people's homes in a single night. And we couldn't do much about it, because it was 1991 and so many of our other colleagues had already lost their jobs.
I did find it entertaining, though, that I was expected to audit our clients' computer systems for security when every computer the partnership owned had the same (obvious) logon and password. When one of the precious portables went missing, the assumption was that someone had tired of the house-to-house late shifts and decided to keep one for their exclusive use. The memos became ever more threatening, culminating in the statement that all the portables had an internal log and that Computer Services Would Know Who Had Been Using It. Um...not without a secret inbuilt retinal scanner, they wouldn't...
In those time I preferred the Sharp PC 1500 to the ZX 81 variants, as it had a nice (but very small) plotter with 4 colored pens ! (I still have it somewhere with the first portable Mac, a very heavy folding SE)... "What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman
I was selling a pre-MS/DOS CP/M system in '82. Saw my first 5 Megabyte hard disk that we sold for 10K...or was it a 10 Meg for 5K? Anyway, it was a lot for a little. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
:-)
In 1979 a couple of us put a Pertec fixed hard drive onto an Apple. One whole meg! (Gah-zang! Gosh, boy-oh-boy.)
The software was primarily designed for 6800 assembly language program development but also included a line editor which could be used as a primitive word processor. I went off to a one week Exorciser School that was more intense than anything I had experienced since college. Fortunately, I had the budget to hire experienced programmers who worked "second shift" to develop the required systems. It was a pretty cool system for the time.
The first p.c. that I owned was an Apple II with dual 3.5" floppies and, I think, 128 Kb of memory. This was '79 or '80. It had a slightly better word processor and, of course, commercially available software. The constraints of being the primary breadwinner for a family of 3 in L.A. meant that I kept that machine almost 10 years. But I wrote the seismic analysis that became the California State PTA's official position paper on that machine and my son learned to type with blazing speed and we all learned to enjoy computer games on it. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
