Day: July 25, 2001

A Steampunk Party

Update 2:25 pm: The appeals court just struck down Microsoft’s petition for rehearing on Finding of Fact 161–that it had illegally co-mingled IE and Windows code.

My sister sent me an email reminding me of a passion that I share with my family for obsolete technology. I visited the website and was blown away by what was available on the website–and by some memories:

ROUGH AND TUMBLE ENGINEERS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION is a unique museum in that we don’t clean the dust off our artifacts – because we’re often out kicking up the dust WITH them. During our show days almost everything on the grounds is run! And during our annual Threshermen’s Reunion EVERYTHING on the grounds that will move under it’s own power can be seen in our daily Parade of Power, a ninety minute parade of antique and obsolete machinery and automobiles.

Talk about steampunk. In a corner of Lancaster County, PA, there’s an organization devoted to keeping antique machinery operating–not Commodore 64s, not Ataris, but steam engine tractors. They have several events a year that can only be described as mindblowing and headsplitting (steam engines aren’t quiet). My great-grandfather, Arthur S. Young, was instrumental in getting the association going. His idea was to keep the old machinery that he loved going and expose the wider public to it so that they could experience the sights, sounds, and smells of these well-built, well-loved machines.

Along the way, though, something funny happened. As the shows went on, the appeal broadened. People started coming for other reasons than the steam engines: I remember seeing people’s crafts, meeting family, watching kids ride model steam trains, eating fried dough made on an antique machine, and generally having a great time. The steam engines were fantastic, and the Rough and Tumble guys had built a community of people who were really passionate about that technology and about keeping it working. And then there was a second community around the first one who weren’t passionate about the steam technology per se, but who enjoyed the heck out of the party and made their own contributions to it in completely different ways.

The Moral, in Geek-Speak

Rough and Tumble is a platform. It’s a hardware platform–serious hardware. Steam engines are the key platform technology. It took people loving the key technology, plus people who dug the platform and could add to it in creative ways, to make the platform a party–a community that lots of people could engage with and which made them all happier.

And me? I’m part of the family that started this party. I just happen to live on the software side.

PS — Steampunk is a term used to describe science fiction written in the historical past. It takes the attitude of cyberpunk and puts it in a world where the gears are big and the engines are loud. I was introduced to steampunk by The Difference Engine by William Gibson (who coined the term cyberspace) and Bruce Sterling.

PPS — I’ll be updating my great-grandfather’s genealogical record shortly to include some of this information, and pointers to the Rough and Tumble page.

Also: I used a new method to post a story and it screwed up navigation via the calendar. To get to the stories for 7/25 and 7/26, you may want to use these links:

Wednesday: “Ni!”

Thursday: “A Steampunk Party”

Virii and Ecosystem Health

I rambled a little yesterday. It’s like that sometimes before 8 am. One of the points I forgot to make in my comparison of IM wars and single sign-on wars is that sometimes keeping a diverse ecosystem is critical to the ecosystem’s health. In English? Two or more strong players in the market are better than one. Common sense, really, except in the computer field, which has for the last ten years had a strong whiff of winner take all about it.

Economists talk about network externalities driving the explosive growth of Windows and of Microsoft Office. A “network externality” is an effect that makes a particular good or service valuable the more other people are using it–at least that’s the common definition.

But I think most people forget that occasionally network externalities can be negative as well as positive. And that’s how we get things like SirCam and other Outlook virii. The Outlook virii bother me because of what they say about email clients. What network externalities can be gained on a large scale from everyone being on just one email client? Within an organization’s firewall, sure, you get value by adding extra components like calendaring (and don’t get me wrong–for corporate email, this is a killer app). But I’m aware of very few companies who extend access to those apps to people outside the firewall. So why does everyone run the same email client?

The real externality in Internet mail is the mail format itself, good old RFC 822. It’s a transfer protocol, just like SOAP. Any client that can speak it can participate in the discussion. If you believe in the logic of network externality, in the email realm there’s no reason that Outlook or any mail client should have the overwhelming market share that it does.

I used to feel fairly secure about email virii. I was the only Mac user in the MBA program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and we used Eudora as the school’s email application. There were always a few people who persisted in using Outlook in spite of the fact that there wasn’t a calendar server anywhere in the school. They spread their fair share of virii, but I was never infected. My diversity protected me. Unfortunately we’re changing over in the fall, largely because of a lack of a unified calendar feature for Outlook. I’m grimly looking forward to discussions with my IT-savvy but Outlook-bigot classmates after the fourth or fifth email virus comes around.

Ni!

Sad but true: Nabokov story submitted anonymously to online editors. Asinine criticisms ensue.

New story: Virii and Ecosystem Health. Why does everyone use Outlook? Really?

I saw the re-release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail last night. It still has the nervous lunacy of a first time film. The rerelease didn’t really clean up the visuals all that much–the picture quality simply wasn’t that good to begin with. I saw it in a theatre with about 12 other people. Quite a different experience from college, in a packed lecture hall with a bunch of people raging drunk reciting the script a step ahead of or behind the action. But still a very funny film:

Oh, I am afraid our life must seem very dull and quiet compared to yours. We are but eight score young blondes and brunettes, all between sixteen and nineteen- and- a- half, cut off in this castle with no one to protect us. Oooh. It is a lonely life: bathing, dressing, undressing, making exciting underwear.

Also: I used a new method to post a story and it screwed up navigation via the calendar. To get to the stories for 7/25 and 7/26, you may want to use these links:

Wednesday: “Ni!”
Thursday: “A Steampunk Party”