Today I’m reading about datalog, which (in some applications at least) is a much less popular competitor to SQL, the language and keystone of an implementation of relational algebra that drives most online data storage today. Some of the ideas in datalog resemble things I’ve heard associated with RDF and the Semantic Web, two technologies that are somewhat marginalized in the context of the web at large, but with some very sharp and accomplished enthusiasts (Rich Hickey, the charismatic inventor of Clojure, refers positively to RDF in several of his talks, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is also behind Semantic Web). #
Thinking about this particular type of marginalization — where lack of popularity is conflated with lack of intellectual merit, or looked at differently, where the fancy of an elite fails to gain near term traction in the marketplace — reminds me of reading Time magazine as a teenager in the early 90s. In particular, the issues and articles exploring how communications would be digitized. #
In Time, the internet was literally marginalized. I remember it had a little box in the margins of a much bigger article that was mostly about how the cable companies were going to invent an “Information Superhighway.” There was also a lot of space devoted to other big corporations that might beat them to it, like the phone companies, or medium sized businesses who might do it, like Microsoft or AOL (Microsoft was smaller then). #
The little internet box in the margins of Time’s article about the future of communications treated this global network as a curiosity. Even back then it was actually doing more of the things people imagined from an “Information Superhighway” than anything from the cable or phone companies. But it wasn’t popular enough to be taken seriously. Only academics and certain computer and defense researchers — only some of the smartest most experienced information technologists in the country, in other words — were on the internet or cared much about it. It wasn’t flashy at this point either. It was almost all text — telnet, gopher, ftp, WAIS, Usenet, email — these were all text systems. If you used them, you could probably imagine something like the web we have today. Berners-Lee, who was at a particle physics lab called CERN, imagined this and he wasn’t the only academic to do so. But to an outsider all these predecessor technologies looked geeky, hard to use, and maybe a little boring. “Oh boy, I can see what books the university library has from across town or the other side of the world. Huzzah.”#
The box specifically focused on how the internet was popular at universities and challenging to use for novices. It talked about the text interfaces, open protocols, diversity of information, global reach, and panoply of technologies. It noted that it had been around for a long time. It wasn’t rude about the internet, and was clearly written by someone who knew it. But the context and subtext made clear the implied takeaway — this is a geeky toy that hasn’t gone anywhere and isn’t flashy or graphical or easy enough for the masses. #
It’s funny how I remember this so clearly decades later. But I was curious about this stuff. My dad took me to a Mac user group meeting or two at UCSD and at one of them I saw demos of HyperCard stacks on CD ROMs and I felt like I was looking at the future of journalism and publishing and information flow and was very excited about it. #
There is a former Sun engineer named Bryan Cantrill who has spoken about the power of a small focused group in today’s technology landscape. The internet can make you feel very small and unpopular (the other person has 3M followers or 5000 likes or 400 GitHub stars and you have very few especially in comparison). But it also connects dedicated small groups and enables them to work together very very well, especially now. Bryan talked about this in the context of SmartOS, a great little server operating system, and the BSD variants, three Unix derivatives that compete with the much more popular Linux. #
I think the replacement for Twitter and Facebook will come from a small group like this. More importantly, things we cannot anticipate, in this information sharing space but in various other spaces, will also come from small smart groups that look like they are playing with toys for extreme geeks or other people at the margins. Being smart is not always enough to invent a better solution to a problem, but neither is being popular, big, or rich. Dedication matters, persistence matters, time matters, and openness matters. As Chris Rock once said, life isn’t short, life is [annoyed tone] loooooooong. #
Today I’m reading about datalog, which (in some applications at least) is a much less popular competitor to SQL, the language and keystone of an implementation of relational algebra that drives most online data storage today. Some of the ideas in datalog resemble things I’ve heard associated with RDF and the Semantic Web, two technologies that are somewhat marginalized in the context of the web at large, but with some very sharp and accomplished enthusiasts (Rich Hickey, the charismatic inventor of Clojure, refers positively to RDF in several of his talks, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is also behind Semantic Web). #
Thinking about this particular type of marginalization — where lack of popularity is conflated with lack of intellectual merit, or looked at differently, where the fancy of an elite fails to gain near term traction in the marketplace — reminds me of reading Time magazine as a teenager in the early 90s. In particular, the issues and articles exploring how communications would be digitized. #
In Time, the internet was literally marginalized. I remember it had a little box in the margins of a much bigger article that was mostly about how the cable companies were going to invent an “Information Superhighway.” There was also a lot of space devoted to other big corporations that might beat them to it, like the phone companies, or medium sized businesses who might do it, like Microsoft or AOL (Microsoft was smaller then). #
The little internet box in the margins of Time’s article about the future of communications treated this global network as a curiosity. Even back then it was actually doing more of the things people imagined from an “Information Superhighway” than anything from the cable or phone companies. But it wasn’t popular enough to be taken seriously. Only academics and certain computer and defense researchers — only some of the smartest most experienced information technologists in the country, in other words — were on the internet or cared much about it. It wasn’t flashy at this point either. It was almost all text — telnet, gopher, ftp, WAIS, Usenet, email — these were all text systems. If you used them, you could probably imagine something like the web we have today. Berners-Lee, who was at a particle physics lab called CERN, imagined this and he wasn’t the only academic to do so. But to an outsider all these predecessor technologies looked geeky, hard to use, and maybe a little boring. “Oh boy, I can see what books the university library has from across town or the other side of the world. Huzzah.”#
The box specifically focused on how the internet was popular at universities and challenging to use for novices. It talked about the text interfaces, open protocols, diversity of information, global reach, and panoply of technologies. It noted that it had been around for a long time. It wasn’t rude about the internet, and was clearly written by someone who knew it. But the context and subtext made clear the implied takeaway — this is a geeky toy that hasn’t gone anywhere and isn’t flashy or graphical or easy enough for the masses. #
It’s funny how I remember this so clearly decades later. But I was curious about this stuff. My dad took me to a Mac user group meeting or two at UCSD and at one of them I saw demos of HyperCard stacks on CD ROMs and I felt like I was looking at the future of journalism and publishing and information flow and was very excited about it. #
There is a former Sun engineer named Bryan Cantrill who has spoken about the power of a small focused group in today’s technology landscape. The internet can make you feel very small and unpopular (the other person has 3M followers or 5000 likes or 400 GitHub stars and you have very few especially in comparison). But it also connects dedicated small groups and enables them to work together very very well, especially now. Bryan talked about this in the context of SmartOS, a great little server operating system, and the BSD variants, three Unix derivatives that compete with the much more popular Linux. #
I think the replacement for Twitter and Facebook will come from a small group like this. More importantly, things we cannot anticipate, in this information sharing space but in various other spaces, will also come from small smart groups that look like they are playing with toys for extreme geeks or other people at the margins. Being smart is not always enough to invent a better solution to a problem, but neither is being popular, big, or rich. Dedication matters, persistence matters, time matters, and openness matters. As Chris Rock once said, life isn’t short, life is [annoyed tone] loooooooong. #
Copyright 2021, Ryan Tate
Last update: Sunday November 14, 2021; 1:51 PM EST.