[Admit it, you were just about to accuse me of not knowing how to spell his name. But before you do that….]
This post is about a different Steven King, and about a film he produced in 1972, called Computer Networks, the Heralds of Resource Sharing. I’d heard of the film many years ago, in the early 1980s, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anyone who had a copy. And I’d forgotten all about it. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, John Howard (thanks! John) commented very briefly on a post I’d written on information filtering; all he did was leave me with a link to the wikipedia article on Postie. As he would expect me to, I read it again, and the relevance of Postel’s Law (or the Robustness Principle) to the discussion became clear.
And, as happens with these things, I read on. And wandered aimlessly around the article and its environs, in a way that one could not do with the physical construct of the information. And while wandering aimlessly I came across the precise video I’d been looking for, which features Jon Postel very briefly.
Unintended consequences of the blogosphere.
I’ve loaded it on to my VodPod, visible on my sidebar, and also left you a link to the Google video here. If you want to get a contemporaneous idea of what people expected to do with the ARPANET and early internet, it’s definitely worth watching. I found it spellbinding. But then I’m weird that way.
By the way, the video is around 26 minutes long, there appears to be about four minutes of “nothing” at the end. You have been warned.