This is progress?

Everybody's raving about it: Don, MSDN Mag, even Steve Gilmore said that "What Bosworth soon will know, and Ozzie already does, is that RSS is nothing less than a new platform for development and deployment." The war of the aggregators is heating up! Threaded navigation! Content push! Right to your desktop! .NET Source code available! The dawn of a new era! Yeah, right...

I've got nothing against this stuff - in fact I'm using SharpReader right now - but all of this is oh-so-familiar. And I'm not talking about the curious fact that nobody got paid to create content, then or now. <g>

Climb into the way-back machine and travel back to 1991 when a number of user / programmers banded together to create Lurker, a (gasp) threaded, customizable, open source, readwriteable front end to CompuServe. The "team roster" in January 1992 showed 58 members (more on that in a subsequent post) who, working together, managed to get about a .8 release together of a program that was actually quite a bit more comprehensive in scope than the aggregators being used today. It had a built-in phonebook, an extensive UI customization including fonts and colors, support for files and libraries (a CompuServe feature similar to a moderated FTP server), rather sophisticated communications code (CompuServe at that time used a proprietary protocol and made it difficult for outside developers to build tools). It even had a pretty cool icon:
Lurker
Ah, those were the days.

So...in the course of a dozen years, we've moved from tree-navigable, threaded view of content of interest to..the same thing? From a 200K redistributable to something closer to 20MB (times 3 on disk)? A complete develoment environment came on three floppies to one that ships on 6 CDs? From an (ASCII) character stream to an (XML) character stream. From VB to ... C#? And this is supposed to be earth-shaking progress? I'm underwhelmed.

1 Comment

  • When I wanted to connect to CompuServe, I had to walk uphill to my friend's house. Both ways.





    But proprietary protocol or not, going from a single data source to tens of thousands of different sources, most of them with no real idea about how to produce well-formed XML, much less valid RSS, does seem to make it a bit harder to get past the Hello World stage. Picture building that frontend for every BBS around in the 90s, and several left over from the 80s, not just CompuServe, and you're closer. But I agree, I've seen enough three-pane aggregators doing the same old same, and I'm ready for a surprise.

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