'semantics' - to the lumper maybe, vitally necessary distinctions to the splitter -g- ... here's where i got that idea -
'SI was the first community on the web' - Message 28674620
'SI was the first to grow purely out of the web browser' ... 'Other communities existed on AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and dial-in bulletin board systems (which is where the Well started)...some of those, such as Motley Fool in 1997, later migrated to the web.'
Message 28674832
This is how i recall it ... having said a number of times that my lawyer and accountant could maybe use a computer, i would never have one, a friend was showing off his third or so and put some company name that i supplied into Altavista, then just let me click around, 'surfing the net' it was called apparently ... this would be summer '96' ... first three sites i found of value were stockwatch.com, Adrian du Plessis's howenow.com [sp?] scam reporting page, and SI ... made the decision to get a computer after being pried off friend's, wanted more of the SI mainly, it was such a brilliant thing, that people from all over the planet could come together in discussion of narrowly specific subjects, especially the flakey little minerals juniors that are traditional canuck specialties ... one guy from Abu Dhabi, money manager there, probably brit by origin, knew a lot about a couple i was following ... never before could you get that specific in topic with that broad an access ... extremely educational, so it was important, and remains so to some of us, the principles of it anyway
You don't have to read arrogance on the part of current management into 'SI was the first internet community' ... it is a simple declarative statement, and true by the fine standards of splitterdom, they bought the outfit and have the legal right to use it ... me i'd criticise something else, and have, and will ... TED's point on the timestamp displayed, oh yeah probably get around to that some day, too stupid, makes you have to look at the calendar and/or the time and figure things out, looks to me like they were copying facebook, which is clearly getting that wrong, facebook should have been copying SI who were doing it right |
