I've been culling through old usenet groups, listserv archives, and personal email spools for my research, and there's a lot of nostalgia to the process. I first started spending time online in 1994, and yes, there was a Web then, but it was still a novelty: I spent at least as much time hanging out on what Alan Sondheim has called the darknet, the twilight world of command line clients and text-only protocols (telnet, shell, usenet, irc, moo/mud, finger, gopher, ftp). I miss it. I miss its texts (like the FutureCulture "Bubble Manifesto" or Sondheim's running Internet Text (here's a taste)); I miss its people (people like Tom Ellis, Greg Ritter, and Andy Hawks who I've now lost track of but who once seemed like the center of the online community); I miss the talk (the rants and flames and faqs and wit and the long, earnest explorations that arrived by the hour from places like Cybermind and Future of Philosophy); and I miss the interface, the command line itself. Yes, of course I can still login to a server with a shell account, but in truth I rarely do, unless I have some program to run or some task to accomplish. Though I'm not much more than an advanced beginner with unix (I can write simple shell scripts, I can pipe, I can grep, I can adjust my profile, but that's about where it ends) I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys. There was a kind of deep, deep patience in that prompt and cursor, those courier incantations whose art I've now lost. And that deep patience--that sense of time, of scale, of sustainable rhythm--also seems lost now, bulldozed under by the broadband blast of streaming screaming everything.
Does anyone reading this still remember Michael Current?
Posted by mgk at June 5, 2003 10:29 AMHi - This is amazingly touching and true. I miss these
days as well - especially the intensity of the writers,
Michael, the lack of spam, Andy's writing (which I reprinted
in a book, Being On Line, and the energy and excitement of the
Net at that point. By the way, Tom Ellis is on Cybermind,
which is still going strong from those days at
listserv@listserv.aol.com. And it was really good to hear
from you - it's amazing how fast time goes by online...
Please do stay in touch - I'm going to send the URL out to other
people who would care - love, Alan
Hey there Matt:
I don't quite feel the same nostalgia, because I don't share some of the same experiences you have described. But your sense of the command line operating in the void of DOS is resonant.
We are being abstracted further and further from the device itself. There is a certain inevitablility in the evolution, similar to the kind you also see in other machines; a car, for instance. Vanishing are the days when you could get "under the hood" and service the vehicle. Perhaps disappearing, as well, the meditative qualities, the cerebral merging of mind and machine.
GUIs are great. But I still love to take a peak behind the curtains, gaze at the resident code. Behind this yet the machine, Delphically brooding, waiting...
John
Posted by: John Torquato at June 6, 2003 09:25 AM | Link to CommentI enjoyed this post. Reading _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_ was almost a religious experience for me. It's useful to recall that for the really old-timers, the command line interface was a fantastic step forward from the days of punched cards.
For some reason, the text on the permalink page appears to be black-on-black. I haven't noticed that on any other permalink pages.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at June 14, 2003 02:04 PM | Link to Comment