But there will also be the possibility of forensic tools that will enable us to at least "spot check" the veracity of our favorite historian.
Yes, it will be harder to push out right fabrications than it has been.
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Indeed! :) Have you ever read about the Xanadu vision for the internet?
I think that the blockchain is taking us closer to that early idea.
never heard of Xanadu before, thanks!
You're very welcome... it is an interesting bit of history.
Hmmm... Interesting. Somehow I missed that in my life. That's pretty odd considering many of the things I have done. I remember early Hypertext in the Mac labs. I was actually designing my own protocol I called Envision before the WWW explosion at the same time other people were working on HTML but it hadn't really come out.
They focused on human readability. I was focusing on packing information into small amounts of bandwidth so we could do big things with low bandwidth connections. I even invented my own Base 64 system to work with it and years later would find out I was only 1 digit different from MIME encoding. (1991-92 time frame I'd guess)
So why is this all Ironic? Considering the fact I was doing all of this I never actually encountered Xanadu.
That is somewhat ironic. But I guess we all view the vast array of life through the narrow slit of whatever tank we may be driving at the time... Not too surprising that we miss significant things.
I was never involved in the Xanadu project, but I admired the vision - a sort of "self-authenticating" web that would interlink all sources back to their origins, and also automatically provide access to commentaries on everything.
I had some ideas for eliminating newspapers... I was contemplating broadcasting news over FM radio sideband channels, using forward error correction to ensure delivery. I was going to build dirt-cheap decoders that used zero-crossing detection a-la Apple ][ audio input ports. You would essentially just need a radio subcarrier (think "Muzak") audio channel fed through a cable into your detector...
Big ideas, zero capital. Go figure! ;)
We could probably write some great "alt history" stories about your MIME encoding and my data distribution schemes... ;)
Yep. I had ulterior motives. People were playing MUDs and we were limited by bandwidth so my motive was gaming. I was coming up with ways to add controls, images, animations, sound, etc and be able to do it over a low bandwidth connection. :)
Mine definitely was not human readable though. You'd use my tools to produce the Base 64 feed that could generate whatever was needed.
It mostly was theoretical. My first son was born and that changed my world and I didn't do much for two years. It was in those two years that the WWW explosion happened.
Very interesting. Thanks for the backstory! ;)