NerdCore Rising: The Blogger Nerd

At first, it was an Apple and the type was green. It was slow. I wrote papers on it. The printer was a dot-matrix and you had to tear the pages apart by hand. The amount of those strips-with-little-holes is probably the bedrock of many landfills now...

Then I had one that had orange type--it was a PC. It was a dial-up and all it had was this orange text...I wrote memos on it. And then we had E-MAIL. And the memos came and went in torrents--or so I thought at the time.

And then, in 1996, I met Richard and the Internet simultaneously. He was an Internet PIONEER. And he had way cool access.

The first time I heard the word "blog" was from his lips. He wanted one. This was in 1999 or so.

And so I got one. It took John Kerry to actually get him one. We learned about how they worked, and didn't work, and how to manage an online community, and how to work with a campaign that did not get it at all, and how to message in and out, and the rest is history.

Forgotten, overlooked history, but history nonetheless.

Someday the story will be told. On YouTube, no doubt.

I used a PDP-11 with magtape - had to boot it up (in a separate room) using octal code. The "monitor" was actually an oscilloscope-type display and green, so if you worked on it long enough, anything white (such as telephone numbers) would look pink, due to retina fatigue.

For word processing, there was no cursor so you had to "infer" where you were in the text. It took me two weeks of training to learn how to use it. The guy who wrote my programs was dyslexic so in exchange for teaching me, I would help him write up his documentation. It was a form of barter.

Also used the Academic Computer Center for data, where I fed in a shoebox full of punch cards and came back several days later to retrieve huge sheets of paper with everything printed out via dot matrix printer. We were given an hour of free game time and the "game" was all in text. We went hunting in the woods for magical items.

The favorite pastime of the nerds I knew and depended on (this was my doctoral program) was to go to Dental Research and get into the nitrous. Then they would either talk with helium in their lungs or play the "Moon Landing Game" which was very primitive. This was while listening to Talking Heads.

I can't think of the programming languages but they were primitive. On the more sophisticated PDP (everything fit in one room), instead of magtapes, we used huge cartridges about 18 inches across and each one would store a few syllables of audio. The computer was used to present stimuli, to present to babies in the next room, who were trained to turn their heads when they heard the sound change (six month olds) or stare at the vowel movie which most closely matched what they were hearing (four month olds).

This is bringing back so many memories!

By the way, the "blog no one reads" was not DCP, it was supposed to be Silenced Majority Portal. Come to find out (from Kayakbiker, and via Technorati) that we actually average 300 hits per day at SMP, mostly foreign people Googling our old stuff, since the blog is so photo-heavy since we're both photographers. I have been told before that DCP (like JohnKerry.com before it) gets way way more hits from lurkers than can be seen by number of comments. One problem for blogs is the people who somehow try to use them to send spam (such as porn or fake Rolexes or Viagra). That's why wierd nonsense stuff appears til someone takes it out.

What will come AFTER YouTube and the internet?! Did you see Markos predicted soon tv and internet would pretty much merge. Already I'm reading (& seeing ) sales of CDs and DVDs go down because of downloading and newspapers and conventional mainstream mass media are taking hits too. The young generation in particular gets most of their news from the internet, and very much sees that people like Colbert, Jon Stewart and Michael Moore are only partly humor/satire.

This is great! Thanks for posting! I love that the vid inspired this trip down memory lane. I for one had -- and this is embarrassing -- a *Word Processor* while everyone else was using computers. It didn't have a hard drive and you had to save your docs on these strange floppy-type discs that weren't actually floppy discs. I'm ashamed of the whole thing but at the time it seemed convenient. Since then I've seen the light and operate fully on both macs and PC's, get frustrated by certain software, and harbor warm feelings towards open-source technology... I was a late bloomer but here I am, rolling deep with the nerds!

Thanks again for the post - DCP rocks!

http://www.nerdcorerisingthemovie.com/home.htm now has same video on its site, and a list of important songs for the movie version, such as "I Hate Your Blog."

You don't even want to know the computer 'family' history around here.

nmp--great video and article. I remember when we were there. They wanted to interview me--but I made them go to you! Am I ever glad I did that. You did a much better interview than I would have.

Sparrow
Are you kidding? I thought they were joking and everybody else is all serious and stuff. Then I really did pretty much forget about it. I thought it was a project for their class or something. Would like to see the NerdCore Rising film itself. The video was up on DailyKos and Open Left and a few other places.

I was comparatively late to the computer party, as my father thought anything other than a genuine IBM-PC AT was an overpriced toy (that includes Apple II, Commodore 64, and anything else that didn't run MS-DOS). I was always jealous of other kids who had tons of Apple II games!

When I finally got a computer in early 1990, it was a "state-of-the-art" 386SX clone, which the salesman had pitched as being "superior" to plain vanilla 386 (which actually was 386DX and faster). All software on it, from MS-DOS to WordPerfect to 1-2-3, were pirated. It had a 20MB hard drive with lots of bad sectors, and 1MB of RAM, as well as VGA graphics.

I got on the Internet in 1994 when I made it to college, with that ancient 386SX (which I had rebuilt into a 486DX, with 4 MB of RAM, 340 MB hard drive, and genuine software, including MS Windows (at last!), by then). I definitely remember running a buggy copy of Mosaic, then Netscape Navigator 1.0N with the blue N! Installing WINSOCK.DLL into my Windows 3.1, and tampering with SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI (not to mention CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT) were common occurrences. By 1995, I was running a few homepages, including a fanpage for Jennifer Aniston. I was also doing some IRC activities also.

Not much change from then, until my DCP days, when Christy got me hooked on blogging, Karen brought me into Facebook, and NMP was one of the reasons I switched to a Mac. Currently hooked on DCP, blogs, and Facebook - and definitely in love with my iMac, the best computer I've ever owned.

NMP

Great interview, btw. Looking forward to the 2008 Netroots Nation.

Great interview and snippets of those at yearlykos. Thanks DiAnne. It's kind of nice to attach a face to the name/s. My first computer back in 1985 was an 800k MacPlus. The very first Mac was 125k, I think.

800k MacPlus included the Operating System and all the Mac software like MacWrite, MacPaint, Mac(originalOfficeSuite)- I can't remember its name but it had a word processor, database, spreadsheet and program for getting online. I couldn't work out why the very hard little disks were called floppys - nothing floppy about them at all. Of course it wasn't set up for Australia so it was just a matter of relearning measurements and all things American. And the little 12 point dot matrix with the feed tracks. How much paper went out with the tracks?

More interesting than that was getting onto - not the internet as such - but email and bulletin boards. I was involved in an organiser of an International Writers Week in 1990, not long after the Berlin Wall came down. I just picked up a notebook that still had empty pages and discovered that it's a notebook I used during that week. I got no sleep at all that week. All the overseas emails came in during our night and I couldn't bear to not get them and reply instantly. So, sleep was out of the question. I was a bit of a wreck by the end of the week.

We had special schools, primary schools, secondary schools, universities all over the world participating. We had authors involved at every venue all over the world. And the children were involved in creating and contributing a traditional tale from their region.

These are some of the US and Canadian schools and I don't remember the universities that were involved. Contributions came from participants aged between 4 and 87.
Len Shepherd Junior Secondary School, Canada. Email: LSP001
Gordon Head School, Canada. Email: LSP035
Nordale Elementary School, Alaska USA. Email: WEW024 {Inuit author Ron Manook, then aged 87, contributed stories and comments to the children everywhere.}
Shoreham Wading River School, USA. Email: WEW008
Calle Mayor Middle School, USA. Email: WEW039

We had an international school in Hong Kong that was represented by students of 74 nations. Also the Hamburg International School in West Germany. It was interesting to read the views of teens at that time who responded to the wall coming down.

There was also a school on the Shetland Islands - you don't get much more remote than that. They made several contributions to our book of local tales. All of the correspondence was in English but I remember loving to read the scottish lilt in the scary stories they contributed, like "the wee bairn".

Daily I copied and pasted emails and news to Bulletin Boards for all to see. The stories we collected and published into a book which I have but I have to wait a few more weeks before I can lift boxes to look for it. If you are interested in some of the material, let me know and I can email it to you personally perhaps.

Gosh - that was my introduction to the internet in 1990. Our only telephone company connected my home to the internet free of charge for that one month. All Australian schools who wanted to participated were connected free of charge for that month also.

And all of this on 800k of operating system and programs - with plenty of spare room for saving. Now - 17 years later - a MacBookPro - 800k wouldn't cope with much at all.