Date: 27 Jul 1992 02:59:12 GMT
From: stoll@ocf.Berkeley.EDU (Cliff Stoll)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Thrills of Long Distance
Organization: U. C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 588, Message 4 of 5

Pat compared the Usenet to Ham Radio.  Got me thinking.

You know, in every technical medium, things start out pure and sweet
and exciting; as they become cheaper and better and more popular, they
lose their purity; their excitement too.

In 1956, nobody called long distance across the Atlantic.  Anyone
older than 40 remembers their first long distance phone call -- with
an eye on the second hand of the clock, you spoke fast.  That one
phone call was cherished and packed with information.  Not the same
thrill today; not the same information content, either.

And Ham Radio: When you could only communicate over morse code,
messages were terse and more hams knew each other.  Equipment was
homebrew, or at least built from kits.  Along with every other ham,
you knew:

  - Morse code
  - soldering skills
  - basic electronics
  - message protocols
  - basic communications etiquette

And each ham knew this in order to communicate, not just to pass a
test.  Intentional QRM and interference were rare.

Today, you might need to know some of this in order to pass a test,
but most hams get along quite well without.

Result: oldtimers claim that the quality of ham radio has dropped.
You hear of malicious hams interfering with others, anonymous
kachunkers on repeaters, and private repeaters closed to outsiders.

Other technological areas are the same way as well.  Used to be that
you froze when you went observing at a mountaintop telescope.  You
wasted no time on a clear night -- every minute was precious.  You
carefully developed a few glass plates, and delicately analyzed these,
often under a microscope.

Now, your astronomical data comes on a magtape, cdrom, or over a
network.  You might never look through an eyepiece ... especially if
you use the Hubble Space Telescope, or any of the other astronomical
spacecraft.  You have more data, and better data too.  But the thrill
just ain't the same.

Is the same thing is happening on the Usenet/Internet?  When you had
to know the TCP/IP suite and there were a few hundred nodes on the
network, we mostly knew each other.  It was a kicker to just get mail
across the network or to ping another node.  There were fewer flames
and nastygrams.

With today's million node network, it's a rare Usenet group without
flamewars.  You might recognize a few posting people, but how many
have you met?  Malicious intruders break into computers.  Many
postings have zero content.

The thrill of receiving junk e-mail from Australia isn't quite the
same as hearing a warbly CW signal on 20 meters which just might be a
DX station.  A telephone solicitor calling from 1000 kilometers away
is just an annoyance -- yet thirty years ago, you'd be happy with a
noisy connection from two counties away.

Something's happening here.  I'm not sure what, but BB King comes to
mind: Thrill is gone.


73's     Cliff    K7TA    stoll@ocf.berkeley.edu


[Moderator's Note: You hit the nail squarely on the head. The thrill
is gone -- it isn't *fun* any longer. And yes, Usenet is the same way.
Most of the net is rapidly becoming unmanageable. Consider this Digest:
When I took over, there were enough messages coming in to put out a
Digest every two days. When Jon Solomon first started the Digest back
in 1981, he would put out two or three issues per week most weeks. For
the past year, messages have flooded in here at the rate of at least
100 per day and sometimes 200 per day -- this group alone. You may
recall the CB radiio 'rage' -- when it was the latest thing back in
the 1975-85 period. Millions of them out there, and finally so many
people got so totally turned off, disgusted with the way it was so
crowded and so full of junk they just quit. Even the FCC gave up any
pretense of monitoring or trying to control 11 meters. Now the band is
very quiet around Chicago by comparison. Only the real twirps are
still out there at it. Watch Usenet and see if the same thing will
happen in the next few years: A rapid increase in sites and traffic
(even more than now!) then suddenly a lot of places just pulling the
plug, at least on net news when they get tired of it.   PAT]