Contra Is Ten Years Old

[jeff_duntemann]

I know I'm older than dirt. What still boggles me a little to think on is that I'm older than...blogging. Yes indeedy: Ten years ago today, I wrote the first entry for something I called VDM Diary. (VDM, of course, being Visual Developer Magazine, which I owned and edited until we shut it down

Comments

[kevinnickerson]

Actually, I'm even more like Al Gore in that I didn't invent blogging-I just like to say that I did.

Does it matter that he said no such thing?

[jeff_duntemann]

Not at all. It's a meme now, and Al has joined America's sizeable collection of national jokes. Millard Fillmore did not install the first bathtub in the White House either, but it's still a great story. And I even like him.

You beat me to it . . .

[apostle_of_eris]

Because a slander has become a full-fledged urban legend is insufficient reason to propagate it.

Not to mention the recursiveness of dissing Gore on the internet he helped create. (I count getting paychecks for the guys who did the work to be very significant help!)

Re: You beat me to it . . .

[jeff_duntemann]

Ok. Since I've clearly stepped on somebody's halo here, let's go back and look closely at what the man actually said:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Huh? Doesn't the grandiosity in this statement make anybody else giggle a little bit? Although "invent" and "create" are not synonyms, they are very closely associated in the public mind. A man who invented something is often rightfully said to have created it. And the expression "I took the initiative in creating..." certainly implies that he kicked off the whole process.

What Gore should have said was something like this:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I had an important role in the ongoing development of the Internet."

That's how I read the history, and though I freely grant the mantissa, we can validly argue about the exponent in "important."

As for recursiveness, well, I'm a Pascal programmer. For me, recursion is well defined, useful, and sometimes the elegant solution.

[obreerbo]

The formula works...no need to worry on that score.

Here's to the next ten years!

[anonymous]

Before the internet became the web, Pournelle had his own section of the Byte Information Exchange (BIX), a sort of bulletin board on steroids run by Byte magazine. One of the bits of that was titled Journal, and while I never read it I suspect it was the original version of his current journal. And his current journal is clearly a blog.

BIX was quite a place in the old days. I joined in the 1980's, when all I had was part-time use of a Zenith laptop with a 300 BPS modem and two 720KB 3.5" diskette drives. But I was a lurker.

RH in CT

I should say

[anonymous]

Brilliant!