February, 1989.

November 27, 2004 10:45 PM

February, 1989.
The U.S.S.R. leaves Afghanistan, a fatwa is issued for Salman Rushdie, Tim Berner-Lee is writing a proposal for something called "hypertext", Salvador Dalí is laid to rest, and Terry Gross interviews William Gibson.
posted by Tlogmer (10 comments total)

Shit: Berners-Lee. (I got the í right, though.)
posted by Tlogmer at 10:47 PM on November 27, 2004

Love the Dali article. The author spends almost as much time ranting about Figueres and the French as he does talking about Dali.
posted by sbutler at 11:19 PM on November 27, 2004

February, 1989.

Coincidentally, that's my birthmonth.
(Yes, I'm a young'un..)

As much as I love Dalí's art, as well as his quotes, (from the article: "I don't do drugs. I am drugs"), his over-the-top exhibitionism has always annoyed me a bit.
posted by anarcation at 11:40 PM on November 27, 2004

I was 14 and worrying about whether to give a cute girl peppermints for Valentine's Day. Strange the things you remember in this big old world.
posted by socratic at 11:41 PM on November 27, 2004

Terry Gross really didn't click with Gibson, did she? I wonder if she'd ever read so much as one of his short stories? I like public radio most of the time, but the cluelessness of some of their interviews amazes me.
posted by rdub at 12:06 AM on November 28, 2004

I can't agree with that after she had Pat Buchanan on her show. I waited on the edge of my seat through the whole interview, waiting for the question I wanted to hear asked. Just as the final minute of the show began to tick down and I'd given up hope, she asked him "So how did you get suckered into the Ali G thing, anyway?"

Score one for her. Score minus one for my main man Bookannan, who claimed that he realized it was all a joke halfway through and just played along. Yeah right.
posted by scarabic at 12:18 AM on November 28, 2004

I found the document by Berners-Lee to be quite inspiring. It's nice to see that great things really can come from ambitious, forward-looking proposals.

Plus, this made me laugh:

"(... and yes, this would provide an excellent project with which to try our new object oriented programming techniques!)"
posted by jeffj at 2:30 PM on November 28, 2004

I'm trying to figure out why I enjoy that parenthetical so much - I think it's the contrast. To see someone describing OO techniques as "new" is quite jarring, but on the other hand, any developer can immediately relate to the sentiment being expressed - the desire to find a project to try out the shiny new idiom/language/paradigm.
posted by jeffj at 2:48 PM on November 28, 2004

Damn, this fine post makes me feel so old.
posted by nofundy at 5:57 PM on November 28, 2004

Hypertext has been around a long time. It was envisioned in the 50s by Dr. Vannevar Bush with his Memex , heavily elaborated on in the late 60s by Ted Nelson's proposal for the Xanadu system. Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for an easy to use hypertext markup language (HTML) and the webserver (of course it was very smart to make it very simple).
posted by abez at 7:46 PM on November 28, 2004