September 16, 2006
The rise of Wikipedia
Cast your eyes back across those web addresses. What are your chances of guessing them? Of remembering them? Of writing them down accurately? If you bookmark them, how confident are you that they’ll be there after the next site re-org?According to Tim, Wikipedia is getting high rankings because its competitors have complicated URI's...
I think a more reasonable answer is that these various other Web sites that, Tim deplores, "don't get enough attention", have very poorly structured information. This is not Wikipedia's nor Google's fault. Nobody links to them because, just like Tim experienced, it's very hard to find the correct information there.
What I like about the effect that Google, and more recently, Digg, have brought to the Internet is that they turned the Web into a popular meritocracy. If a page gets a high score, it's because a lot (a lot!) of users have expressed that they found this particular page or site useful by casting a vote for it.
As for standardizing URI's... I do remember an effort from the W3C about ten years ago to do just that, but the truth is: except for hackers, nobody cared about URI's back then and nobody cares about them now.
September 11, 2006
Good old days
Someone recently pointed me to http://abandonware-magazines.org/ , a Web site dedicated to old French computer magazines from way back when. The creators of this web site took hundreds of magazines from the time, scanned them and made them available for all to see.
Talk about a trip through Memory Lane... Going through these old magazines that taught me the very first things I learned about computers was quite an experience.
Flashback.
The oldest one for me is L'Ordinateur de Poche, which started in 1981 and covered "pocket computers", as they were called back then (HP 41, TI 57-58-69, and later, slightly more powerful devices such as the PC-1211). The pages are replete with endless listings of code that definitely qualify as language machine today but which, back then, were considered the state of the art in terms of expressivity.
I remember typing in a lot of these listings which, most of the time, contained reams of "DATA" lines with dozens of numbers per line. Sometimes, getting one of these wrong meant the program would not start at all, and you'd have to double check every single line. After BASIC, I slowly started understanding assembly language (helped in that with my various HP calculators) and how these two languages could be used together to create the best of both worlds.
But the real fun started with my Amiga, circa 1986. A couple of years later, I started writing articles for the main Amiga magazine in France, Amiga News (which we had to rename A-News after a few issues because Commodore sent us a cease and desist. It was pretty obvious to us that Commodore felt that we were competing with their own magazine, Commodore Revue, which we ended up outlasting). If you are interested by additional trivia on A-News, read my interview by the creators of the Web site.
My first in-depth article was the complete disassembly of the SCA virus, which appeared on the Amiga in 1987 and is widely recognized as the first "public" computer virus that impacted hundreds of thousands of people. If you are not impressed with these numbers, keep in mind that back then, we had no networks and no hard drives. That's right, the virus was communicated through floppy disks...
I remember being absolutely stunned by the listing I uncovered, mostly because while I appreciated the technical excellence of its author (it fit in less than 512 bytes), I just couldn't figure out why he wrote this piece of code in the first place. What was the point, really? I just didn't get it, and to me, it was just an intriguing idea without much future. How wrong I was about that...
At any rate, you can see the entire disassembly here (in French, sorry).
I continued my trip by thumbing through more reviews and it was quite interesting to see the various discussions about the future of the Amiga. Windows was, of course, seen as the main competitor, but it was not rare to see OS/2 being mentioned as a very viable option as well...
Still, the Amiga community was very fanatic and didn't take criticism lightly. When Windows 95 finally came out after numerous delays, it didn't take me long to realize that while Windows 3 was most likely inferior to the Amiga Dos, Windows 95 had definitely leapfrogged everybody else and that the days of the Amiga were numbered.