BPN 1635: My last handwritten letter

Yesterday I looked back on the 20th anniversary of the XS4ALL, one of the first Dutch ISPs that  opened its servers for consumers twenty years ago. Yesterday my (maybe last) handwritten letter was published online in the project Life needs Internet.

I met the digital artist of this project  at Graz (Austria) last year at the award ceremony of the European Youth Award. In his project, Jeroen van Loon asks people to send a handwritten letter to him with their first acquaintance and experience with Internet. My letter is four pages long and available on the Internet site Life needs internet.

For this posting I copied the first two paragraphs of my letter entitled From a link to heaven to (wireless) internet.

On February 1, 1970 I stood on the quay of Hook off Holland. After four years U.S. I was back home. I came from the pleasant sub-Mediterranean climate of New Orleans into the extreme cold of the Netherlands. And this was not just the weather, but also because of the drastic change in my life.

From my 11th year I had spent my life in seminaries, boarding schools for students who were trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Life in these institutions was quite ascetic. From early morning to late evening they were engaged in communication with the invisible deity in the form of prayer, meditation, contemplation and rituals in between study. To my 25th year turned my life around spirituality or better yet a line with heaven.

Life needs Internet is not an invitation project. Anyone can submit a handwritten letter and describe how they became acquainted with the Internet or how Internet affects their daily life.

BPN 1634: Twenty years internet access for Dutch consumers

It is not clear who the first Dutch supplier of Internet access for consumers was. In 1992 there were only 239 companies users of the internet systems of service providers (ISPs) such as XS4ALL, NLnet, Knoware and IAE. For example, a company would pay for a subscription 100 guilders  (45.50 euros) to XS4ALL. The number of companies connected to the Internet was not large, because the internet online system was only known by small group of entrepreneurs, mostly university graduates. Entrepreneurs outside this group did not have any idea of ​​the Internet and were linked to other systems such as Videotex Netherlands, ASCII databases and email systems as Low Cost Linking.

The  ISPs were really yet interested in consumers. The ISPs did not have the marketing machines and helpdesks. If a consumer accidentally wandered by and wanted to have a subscription, h/she would get it, but without a manual. All that started to change in 1992.

XS4ALL arose from the organization Hack-Tic, a group of people that exchanged hackers tricks, tips and files with each other. The organization initially made use of the facilities of the University of Amsterdam. But the university stopped the group from using its computernetwork. So that was the time Hac-Tic started  the foundation XS4ALL.

From 1992 XS4ALL started to accept members of the Hobby Computer Club (HCC) besides companies. And early 1993 the management decided to accept consumers. So 20 years ago on May 1, 1993 XS4ALL started to offer consumers access to its servers for 30 Dutch guilders (roughly 13 euro) a month . XS4ALL was the first ISP who started to take consumers seriously. They management predicted that  50 subscribers would sign on the first day. By the evening of May 2nd, 1993 at 19.00h the ISP had registered 500 consumers. There was clearly a need for internet among consumers. The first wave of consumer subscribers might have been helped by an article about internet, which was published in the Dutch national morning daily De Volkskrant that day.

From May 1, 1993 the number of subscriptions to Internet for consumers increased steadily, but not by the hundreds. Until later in the year XS4ALL started to collaborate with the political and cultural centre De Balie in the project and the Digital City in Amsterdam. The project had been devised to promote the municipal elections in the spring of 1994. Apart from the local television, radio and print media, the Digital City would be part of the public debate. On Monday, January 17th 1994 the Digital City opened its doors. This project caught the fascination of  many of the  national media wonder and as a side effect  it generated a lot of publicity for internet. In 1994 alone this project generated eight television and radio fragments, starting with an interview with Frank de Grave and the mayor of the Digital City Marleen Stikker in the 8 o'clock news on January 15, 1994 according to the database of Sound and Vision. After six weeks the project had tallied up more than ten thousand registered users.

In 1996 the foundation created a company, which was sold to the incumbent telecom operator KPN in 1998. However XS4ALL remained independent as a subsidiary and now offers various internet access services such as ADSL, SDSL and fibre and via KPN information and entertainment packs.

BPN 1633: WWW browser 20 years

Today in the Netherlands the queen has abdicated and the new King, Willem Alexander, has been sworn in. There will be no republic in The Netherlands for a generation, roughly 30 years. So no festivities for the republicans

But for the digital natives among them, there is something else to celebrate. Twenty years ago on April 30th, 1993 the research laboratory CERN in Geneva released the software for the world wide web for free. It was the beginning of a new era. If the World Wide Web software had not been there, internet would have never come about.

© Collection Jak Boumans

The World Wide Web software was developed on a Next computer by Tim Berners Lee who worked as a researcher at a laboratory in Geneva. In 1989 he produced a first proposal on paper for a new online software. Central in this software was the concept of hypertext, an idea developed by the British scientist Ted Nelson. In order to link textual information of various fragments together and not in a linear or hierarchical way but ad random. It meant that text fragments could be linked but also text and illustrations, but also text, illustrations and sound fragments. The browser was born, but for it he needed a common mark-up language (HTML), a protocol (TC/IP) and a web address. 

The software was spread around to developers from the 6^th of August 1991 onwards. And only from April 30th, 1993 the web browser was released for general use for free.  So in 1993  a project group of the University of Illinois started to work on a browser, which could handle www pages, but also graphics, illustrations and text pages. By 1994 a commercial browser had been developed by Marc Andreessen, one of the Mosaic developers, under the name Netscape.

Support announcement

BPN 1632: Anniversary Dutch Channel 3 beginning of the end

On Thursday April 4 the Dutch public broadcast system celebrated the launch of, Nederland 3,  its third channel, 25 years ago. From 1988 the channel brought information, culture and sports. Presently the channel is used amongst others for testing new television formats, using the slogan: For youngsters and those who feel young. The channel was launched in 1988 by the a minister, indicating the importance of its importance for the public broadcast system. The channel was instituted in a time when the commercial broadcast sought ways and bypasses in order to reach the Dutch audience. Commercial radio and later television companies started attempts to break into the radio and television market. Channel 3 was part of the last defence by the public system against those upcoming commercial broadcast companies.

Now 25 years later,  the channel offers news, music, travel, human interest, talk shows and documentaries, often in combination with new media. In fact it Is a varied basket of programs, produced by one of the 21 broadcasting companies.

The public broadcasting companies have been asked to reduces their spending this year with 200 million euro. One of the measures is to kick small religious and humanistic broadcasters out of the system. The Dutch system has a broadcasting company for every belief: the Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews, the Buddhists and the Moslems. Now the number of companies will be reduced from 21 to 8, with some big ones to merge. In this way the public broadcast system hopes to reduce costs.

But will this happen?  Reducing costs on such a mammoth tanker is difficult. Although it belongs to the small expenses , a proposal for a new overall logo was recently launched, which means new URLs, leaders, writing paper, coffee cups, merchandise.   Besides not all broadcast companies will have enough money to compete with commercial programs. So will channel 3 be the last channel in and the first one out? Why not.

Over the years the public broadcast system serving radio and television have been producing a variety of programs for every age and target group and the question can be asked whether this is needed. Do amusement programs have to be carried by public broadcast companies? Do expensive sports programs, including  the dope ridden Tour de France, to be paid by the public broadcast system? The CEO of the public broadcast system Mr Hagoort formulated his five  priorities at the last New Year reception:  journalism, Dutch language drama and documentaries, children’s programs, knowledge and culture, national and international events.

Of course these priorities look fine, but the proof of it will be in the pudding. Will the companies deliver quality or not? I guess that the companies will find out that they have not money enough to fill the radio and television channel. So the next step will be the reduction of channels, eventually to two television channels and two radio stations.

This would be a drastic move, but a realistic one. It would shape a fair playing field between the public and commercial broadcasting companies. But it would  also be change the world of  digital media companies, which have the public broadcast companies as , being sponsored with public money, as competitors. Yes it would be a really drastic move, but give it more than five years....

 

BPN 1631: Research Trends Digital Media

Last Thursday it was the last guest lecture I presented to sophomore students Communication of the Applied University of Windesheim Flevoland in my hometown Almere (NL). The course was called Research on Trends in Communication, but it soon turned into Research on Trends in Digital Communication. The format of the guest lectures was: sitting in on a Powerpoint presentation, reading a relevant article, and writing five blog postings on the subjects treated. The guest lectures were in English, not in the Dutch language. The subjects were: Pre-internet, the disruptive technology of Internet, the creative industry, content and foresighting. One lecture was spent on searching the internet under the slogan: Formerly we believed in God, now in Google (Paul Claes). Social media was not explicitly on the list as we thought it more important to get the students blogging before going into micro-blogging.

Having explained the principles of foresighting with the Powerpoint presentation of my World Summit Award colleague Suzanne Stein, who works at the Canadian Film Centre, the students got the assignment to discover trends. Each of them was assigned a category of the World Summit Awards contests, WSA Global, WSA Mobile and WSYA, and write a blog posting about the trends. This turned out to be an interesting exercise as each student had at least some 50+ winners to study and analyse. The WSA sites, divided over three sites (www.wsis-award.org, www.wsa-mobile.org, www.youthaward.org) can of course be used for more purposes in education. Besides the study of trends, they can also be used as research for potential projects. In the e-Learning category for example there are several examples of school curricula and in e-Culture there are several examples of promoting cultural places and museums.

Besides discovering trends and doing research on the winners, the winning projects are a source of inspiration for students and people in the trade.  And these three sites with 50+ winners are only a tip of the iceberg of submissions, which the WSA organisation has collected over the years. As all these submissions have passed judgement on the national level, it would be interesting to have access to all of them in one database. A conservative estimate will total 4000+ projects submitted. The World Summit Award database has proven to be an interesting hunting ground for trends to students and people working in new/digital media and communication.

For a specimen of the blogs produced, please have a look at the posting Trends in E-entertainment and games (link with permission by the author Denise Duijvenbode).

               www.mbillionth.in