Mark Marlboro
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

He wasn’t off-base in calling it a “wasteland of unfiltered data.” He was 20 years ahead of his time.

In 1995, Dr. Stoll, actually wasn’t “ahead” of his time, it had already happened. I remember when he said it, and I also at that time, I thought it was old. Basically, although the Web introduced in 1989, it was still a rather new and until Mosaic came out in 1993, the World Wide Web was not widely known, nor used that much. 1993 also marked the entry of AOL’s connection to the Internet.

I had been on the Internet for some time before 1993 and had been on Usenet since the early 80s. There were beginner forums and some expert forums, not much in between. What started in 1993 was that “newbies” had started showing up in the expert forums. Please remember that the Usenet world was primarily UNIX based; not that all users were UNIX “heads” but scientists and increasingly the financial sector generally were using UNIX. What happened, while discussing finite state automata or arbitrary precision and how to code that, someone, which seemed to be mostly from AOL, asked “What’s UNIX?”, or a little more intelligent “What is arbitrary precision?” but still annoying. This would degrade into flaming, and get the hell off kind of responses. There were some unwritten rules on behavior and where you start. Then the amazing thing was that some newbies came back with, “I was just asking. Who the hell are you to tell me to get off!”. Then flame wars resulted. You think that Twitter and it’s ilk, are vile? Twitter is so tame compared to what was happening on Usenet. I just told them to go to beginner forums. I got flamed back. You try to help them get to the correct forum and they get pissed off. It all stared happening in 1993. So, by most accounts, by 1995 when Dr. Stoll said the above, it was already two years old. I was sick of this flaming and by 1995, I stopped going to Usenet. It was a waste of money since we were on POTS and connect time cost money. It became a wasteland. Dr. Stoll was talking about “current events”, not the future. But, what we already know, history repeats itself.

I think it was Socrates or maybe Plato, but no conclusive evidence “the trouble with youngsters today…” attributed to people who lived in circa 330 BCE (maybe even earlier), is just as apropos today and with each successive generation since the ancient Greeks. History regularly repeats itself. So, Dr. Stoll’s “current events” unfold again today.

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    Mark Marlboro

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