Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

(Not a lot of crypto relevance, except as it relates to progress and
the illusion of progress.)

Jamie Lawrence wrote:

> At 5:49 PM 11/18/94, Timothy C. May wrote:
> 
> >Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics,
> >no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc.
> 
> But Tim, don't you believe in the march of progress?
> 
> ;)

There's a larger point here, of course, about how much of what we
think of as "time-saving" progress actually _isn't_. Many of the
things I spend time on, ostensibly to eventually be more productive,
will never, ever be "paid back." I won't bore anyone with details.

> (I agree. I retrieved some of those docs this issue arose over. I
>  got a MIME doc, the header of which told me to fetch a translator,
>  and when translated I text plain text. I know that simple ASCII
>  will be overtaken by fancier tech, but why the hell encode plain
>  text in a non-human readable format?)

I have an interesting tale to tell, probably as many of you do as
well. From simple typewriters to dry transfer fancy fonts (which I did
several science faire projects with in the 1960s), back to simple
typewriters in the 1970s, then on to daisy-wheel printers in the late
1970s...

By the mid-80s, LaserJets, LaserWriters, Helvetica, Times Roman,
italics, PostScript, kerning, leading, Macintoshes, and "desktop
publishing." Vast amounts of time spend prettifying documents that
would just as well have been comprehended if they were simple ASCII!

Then came my Second Coming on the Net (my First was an account on the
nascent ARPANet, circa 1972-3). Portal, then Netcom. From 1988
onwards, my universe was mainly _text_. (Yes, I favor structured
outliners and editors, like MORE and StorySpace, but mainly as a way
to organize ideas. The Cyphernomicon shows htis outline structure.)

No fancy fonts, no kerning, no monomanical focus on "appearance."
Bliss.

I saw that the Net had caused the pendulum to swing away from a
strange focus on typography and back to a healthier focus on ideas and
the arguing of them. Bliss.

But now, in the name of "progress," about half the mail messages I get
have (apparently) fancy graphics in them, causing my screens to fill
up with stuff like "Warning: The message blah blah contains ISO Font
5738937-B2737, which is apparently not installed in this system. You
have these choices....blah blah."

My French correspondents send me messages no longer readable on my
system (elm, Eudora), requiring me to zmodem the attachments to my
home machine for reading with a text editor!

And now that Mosaic and Netscape are such big deals (which I'm not
knocking, though--true to form--I use the character-based "lynx" to
access the Web), I expect a swing of the pendulum in the other
direction, toward a time-wasting focus on kerning, fonts, leading,
whitespace, gutter widths, etc.

Gag me with a spoon.

--Tim May


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