We used to crowdsource flashmobds over a BSD 3.5 or so PDP-11 at the University of California Santa Cruz.

It had what we would now regard as quite primitive, but really was quite a well thought out message board that we just called "The B Forum", as ucscb.ucsc.edu was an "Open Access Computer", free for the asking my anyone who could flash a reasonably decent color photo copy of their cousin's campus ID.

At the time that was regarded as quite forward thinking. UCSC had maybe six vax 11/780, but consider that the MS-DOS 80386 at like 16 MHz was widely advertised as being the equivalent of "One VAX MIP".

"Millions of Instructions Per Second". I once got a guided tour of the MIPS corporate headquarters, where our guide card-keyed us into a test lab. We all puzzled over this six-inch tall heat sink that looked just like Manhattan from a great distance.

"Oh everybody knows we're working on a Ten MIPS product for next year."

So tell me - I'm typing this on my Mom's 32-Bit PowerPC G4 iMac at 1.2 GHz over a 56k dialup modem.

How many GIPS does YOUR Turgid Phallus have? Better overclock your erect member, or your going to come home in the middle of the afternoon one fine day to find your main squeeze doing the dirty with my _TIPS_ smack in the middle of your ceramic tile kitchen floor!

We all chatted via the b forum with 24x80 2400 Baud Glass TTYs. I mean like not even the Televideo TVI910+ I blew half my Summer job savings on so I wouldn't have to hang out at Caltech's oubliette - oh sorry, my mad, I meant to say "computer center" - with all the other acne infested poptartivores.

I mean I down my own acne and all-poptart diet but that didn't imply I wanted to also smell my classmates from the next workstation.

So anyway I dialed in via my $1200.00 2400 Baud Hayes Smartmodem, to learn that we are all going to meet up at midnight at the Lyon's restaurant - rather upscale from Denny's, but not as upscale as Coco's or Shari's for coffee, ice cream and to hang out and chat about how to find all the Magic Mushrooms that grow all over that Damn campus, and have so grown since long before the Dawn of Humanity.

So at like 11:55 or so, suddenly there's no empty spaces in the parking light, so I park my ancient, used, beat up Toyota Corona mid-sized station wagon on the street.

By 12:05 PM there were 100 UCSC students who all wanted to sit together.

They work up their entire staff at home out of their warm, comfortable beds, ordered them in for like two hours of overtime, then rearranged all the tables and chairs into one long, narrow conference table.

I don't clearly recall but I expect I myself ordered one single scoop of ice cream.

Most ordered just one coffee as it had a bottomless carafe - ie. Infinite Free Coffe Refills.

Those who were savvy investors, rather unlike young gentlemen like myself had the wherewithal to order BOTH coffee AND icecream.

I can't recall any of out of our 110 Starving Students ordering anything else, let alone a proper meal.

I know all about what it's like to have to work for a living, so I left maybe a fifty cent tip.

Most of my colleagues were not too poor to tip, nor were they cruel nor satisfied with their service.

No they were to ignorant to know they were expected to tip.

As we started to leave, leaving droplets of melted ice cream and little puddles of spilled coffee all over the place the manager walked right up to ME - what did I do? I'm NOT the perp! I'm a patsy! Lissen Sweet Lady I'm an innocent man ya got the wrong guy and shouted:

DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!

What I'd like to see:

An App that had a GUI as well as crisp responsiveness and well-thought-out usability just like Hacker News, but without an actual webserver.

No, one could connect to other "MyCombinator" members by emailing each other, say, a hash or so, then reading that email in Apple's Mail App.

The hash would look something like:

http://mycombinator.co/?new-userid=a3B7cccd

That would bring up a page that would preselect just the text "a3B7cccd". One copies it to the clipboards, pastes it into MyCombinator, then whoever is responsible for sending that has joins your board and you join theirs just as if you and they were the only two members of MyCombinator.

Now I do fully understand that I just popped a billion dollar product concept, but I'm very tired and the reason I am buck naked as I write this is that my monkey will simply not permit me to sleep unless I spank him first.

CIAO, BELLA!