Re: Dating the Internet (was Re: Funny Tech Writing)

[doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com]

On Friday 28 April 2006 10:00, Clare Turner wrote:
> OK, ok, ok - good god, people - must EVERYONE pick on EVERYTHING?  

Naw.  But unqualified references to the time before email/internet? Well 
that's a right yar little target, being the 'boomer/hacker equivalent of the 
Autralian aborinee's 'dream time.'  ANY reference to it at all will be a 
desecration of someone's mythology or ideas.  

So on balance, I think yes, if you define the beginning of the internet AND 
email as a POINT, you have in some sense thrown down a gauntlet. And any 
sworn defender of the realm will rise to the occasion, yes.

Do you need some advice?  change "/" to "OR" (the phrase 'email OR internet' 
is less shiny, attracts fewer grammarhawks and factcheckers), wear protective 
gear at all times, and above all else. get out more often.
 
>
> My SIMPLE point was that my first exposure to the silly mouse balls
> thing was NOT thru the Internet...we DID manage to communicate with
> other people before then!

I believe the mouseball memo was indeed an internal communication at IBM, but 
it may have been a meme as well as a memo.  The mouse ball arose at PARC, 
yes?  PARC was a Xerox Corp facility. IBM's lab was Watson, I believe.

But whatever, you can date this memo to at least the late 1970's.  IIRC, that 
was when the push began in earnest to replace the typewriter with the PC. 
Workplace productivity was no longer to be dependent on keyboards alone, but 
also now on mice, floppy disks, hard disks, and a handful of other easy 
targets of ribaldry.  In this case, the question was, how to introduce the 
terminolgy and make the mouse acceptible to typewriter people. And the 
solution was, well...

Ned Bedinger
Ed Wordsmith Technical Communication
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