Oddbean

Do you mean Tim? We're on first name terms here 😂 How is he doing? Yes, my wife's office still has a fax machine in it. CRAZY! The NHS spine is an interesting project. I get to see it from an end user (my wife's) view point.

Yes, I know Tim pretty well, been working with him 15 years. We made solid together. And there was a little piece of Solid that transmits notifications over websockets via pub/sub. Which is exactly what nostr does. But that broke. And instead of fixing it, it was easier to build up nostr instead :D. Now I'm putting nostr back into solid (hopefully). It's all one big jigsaw. We were literally talking about fax machines yesterday. The young dude scribing said (did you say "facts machine") lol. Tim was saying we need to scan it, but there could be smudge in the data and so on. It's a real pain. I've found dealilng with the NHS a real pain too. My sister has health problems, and I wanted premission to talk to her doctor. She gave permission, but surgery said she has to fill out a bunch of forms. That's just too much for her. So whole thing is taking years. Things will improve very slowly. I think at one people there was this whole drive to "gamify" the NHS. But it just added more layers of bureaucracy.

Yeah this is what they were talking about too. Apparently it's way worse in europe than the US. Though it's bad in the US. In theory everyone has a right to their own data. In practice it can be hard to get. Technology can fix this, but they are slow to take even the smallest improvments, and there's mind boggling $$$$ interests every step of the way.

Tim's doing good. For around 70 he's got a sharp mind. Very creative person. I normally learn something each time I speak to him. Tho at this point, almost everything in his head, is now in my head, for better or worse. We have always had a plan to roll out a completed, decentralized versoin, of the web. Nostr is one side-effect of that. Whether or not anyone will want to use it is another question.

Of course. I orange pilled its inventor. Ted Nelson is great. So, if you read Tim's book, he want to visit Ted Nelson. Ted wrote a book called "Literary Machines" and Tim got a signed copy. Then when he got home he sent Ted a check for the book, but Ted could never cash it because it was in swiss franks. Years later I paid for the book in bitcoin which cost 0.25 bitcoin at the time (I wish I had that today!). And proved to Ted that we could do transactions on the internet that worked. Probably the most expensive demo I've ever done. But Ted is now a bitcoin fan, and he loves satoshi, I had some good chats with him about it. Ted makes some great content still. Xanadu is great, but I think the web project won because it was closest to the status quo as possible, html was like sgml which browsers already used, and http was like smtp which email already used. Xanadu was more a shift in paradigm with transcusion and other cool stuff. I think it's still going, I like it.

Big competitor to the web at the time was Gopher. Then at some point there was a rumour they would charge fees on some of the instances. At that point everyone switched to the web which had no transaction fees or royalties. So people get to try the system for free, and later comes the commerce layer. Tho commercial layer of the web has gone a bit too far. Hence working on an open web to create a balance.

Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, I used them all before the web. We built data centres in the late 80's - 2000's, we had usenet feeds and all sorts going on. I've been having a discussion about NTP recently and shocked to see it be superseded by PTP. Apparently we need nano second accurate clocks in our X boxes now 😂

Literally working on some of his code (for smart widgets) right now. Tim is actually a very very good coder. He doesnt have all the modern tooling but most of the time that's actually an advantage. https://image.nostr.build/abe22c3a9ea69cbc04e21c7898b9bcb89bbdc67f31bd4c3e3e1431e2dea04fb7.jpg

In software we have lost a whole generation that follow a set of rules but dont question them or look under the hood. Simple example: all programmers, and you'll see this is every nostr client and NIP work on the princple of "global variables are bad". Meaning that if you have a property of something it must be local to your system and not shared. Because sharing creates a mess. Timbl OTOH built the whole web based on global variables, namely hyperlinks. He once said, "in some languages when you use global variables, they fall apart. When you add them to hypertext, you get the web". A few small tweaks to the existing system can make it so much more powerful, but it's very very hard to explain that to anyone. Even for Tim. He has concluded that you just have to build it.

You're getting slightly too esoteric for this 1980's COBOL programmer 😂 BTW: Have you ever seen a Hungarian mainframe manufactured by a state run company called Videoton which ripped off the Bull Mitre O/S and a german COBOL compiler. It was called the VT6000 and we had the only one in the west because both MI5 and Hungarian intelligence were trying to recruit my Dad as a spy. He got favours from both sides 😂 Try using printed instruction manuals written in Hungarian, French and German 😱 That was my introduction to serious computing after starting off with a Dragon 32, Commodore PET and then an IBM XT.

We were lectured by Herman Hauser who started ARM. Incredible guy. They called him "Herman the German", but he was actually Austrian. ARM got sold for pennies, compared to what incredible technology it was. He said to us that arm went from 0 to 100m in 3 years which at the time was UK's most successful ever company. There's a story of bill gates flying to cambridge to get a picture with HH. He said their big mistake was that they didnt focus on the American market until it was too late. Still amazing tech.

This is a review of the Videotone Minimax a HiFi loudspeaker made by Videoton. My Dad rebranded them from Videoton to Videotone meaning Video and Sound for the UK market. They mention my Dad "Cliff Hardcastle" by name. It brought a tear to my eye as he passed away in June this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P3YWTTl91U