City Limits

A lesson to be learned from typing the wrong E-mail address:

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years before.

Because of their hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minneapolis and flew to Florida on Friday, and his wife was flying down the following day.

The husband checked into the hotel, and unlike years ago, there was a computer in his room, and he decided to send an email to his wife.

However, he accidentally left out one letter in her E-mail address, and without noticing his error, sent the email to the wrong address.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston .. a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. He was a minister who was called home to glory after suffering a heart attack.
The widow decided to check her E-mail, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and then fainted. The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and then glanced up and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Date: Friday, October 13, 2005
Subject: I have arrived!

Dearest Love:

I know you are surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now, and you are allowed to send E-mail to your loved ones. I have just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow, and look forward to seeing you then.

Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

Oops. . .

Submitted by our old pal Beameup Scotty:

Before this whole Internet/Web fad, before AOL, before CompuServe, before even Prodigy, we had the BBS — dialup Bulletin Board Systems serving communities of computer users. BBSes had their heyday in the Eighties, and they were generally small, homebrew systems — a Sysop (System Operator) would start up a BBS by installing special software on a spare computer, attaching a modem and a phone line, and waiting for the calls to roll in.

The BBS was primarily a local thing, because generally people didn’t want to spend money to dial long-distance. So what you had in the Eighties (and still very much into the Nineties, and a bit still today) was a broad patchwork of regional online communities. This local aspect of the system was largely lost when everyone moved to the Internet, and it’s only present in niche sites like Craigslist and various City Guide sites.

In their heyday, there were over 150,000 BBSes in North America alone. There remain a mere few hundred. Here are about 10 minutes worth of clips from The BBS Documentary; they will help to shed a little light on our old world to those who weren't familiar with it:

As I reported in an earlier post, I still have my BBS, City Limits!, on it's original computer. If you click on the link in that last sentence you will be taken to an online emulation of my BBS that I created over 10 years ago. I still fire up the real thing once every few years, and log in through Front Door just for nostalgia. Blogging is as close as I have come to finding the sense of comaradery that BBSes provided.

Braces and oral sex just don't go together well. . .

Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run. In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer:

Its current caretakers, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape's usage dwindled with Microsoft Corp.'s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.

"While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer," Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead.

A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.

The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows.

Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.

Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape's stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2 billion market value even though it had only $20 million in sales.

But Netscape's success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.

Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10 billion deal completed in early 1999.

Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing.

Nov 26 1865

Lewis Carroll sends the manuscript for the psychedelic novel "Alice in Wonderland" to his 12 year old special friend Alice Liddell. (Incidentally Carroll, born Charles Dodgson, had a thing for very young girls, frequently photographing them nude.)

Nov 26 1973

The Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, stabbed to death in prison by a fellow inmate in Massachusetts. DeSalvo had killed 13 women.

Nov 26 1975

Manson family member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme found guilty of attempting to assassinate President Ford. It is unclear why anyone would want to assassinate such an uninteresting president.

Nov 26 1976

Sex Pistols single Anarchy in the UK released. The song later appeared on Never Mind the Bollocks. Sadly, it has yet to be equalled.

Woman Finds Boyfriend Dead In Cat Door
Ironically, he was after some pussy

Public schoolboy told Valentine 'I am the Grim Reaper', then battered her to death
Girl allegedly replied, "You call that a scythe?"

Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe
Demand aliens buy American, as the old UFO probes make their asses too sore

Monkeys rampage in Indian capital
Bush suspects monkeys trained by Al Queda, asks Congress to nuke Iran

Quebec boy dies after schoolyard shoving match
Attacker hits like a girl... oh, wait!

Great Grandmother Strip-Searched At N.Y. Casino
When she removed her bra it sounded like two wet sandbags hitting the floor

Internet gambling is a target of Patrick bill
"Hold it right there, Asshole! You put that money in OUR pockets - er, casinos!"

Skydiver survives 2km fall
He aced the written exam and just barely passed the skills test

Police: Man Raped Wheelchair-Bound Woman
Just like riding a bike

Metreon victim was killed after standing on escalator, not walking
First floor - socks, underwear, ammo

The Asylum Street Spankers nail it once again:

The Rude Pundit strikes again!

Helicopter

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Public Main Page

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H/T to Be Part of the Solution A new addition to the Fort Wayne blogging community.

H/T to Be Part of the Solution A new addition to the Fort Wayne blogging community.