By Al Gordon
Help Desk
May 25, 2008 01:54 am All this hype about how kids texting on their cellphones have invented a new abbreviation language is enough to send you ROTFL. Most of the shorthand now is vogue today — from "Rolling On The Floor Laughing" to "smiles" :-) — dates back to the early 1990s when it was used on the primitive online networks of the day. Then, as now, the need was to find a way to conserve text strokes. Where the issue in text messaging on a cell phone is typing a 26-letter alphabet on a 12-key number pad, the problem 15 years ago was that dial-up services not only were slow, but initially charged by the amount of time used. (America Online's decision to go to "all you can eat pricing" may well be the most under-appreciated step in the advancement of the Internet — but I digress.) Thus, "ROTFL" or "LOL" (laughing out loud) allowed users to say "that cracked me up" at lower cost. Smilies, BTW (by the way), were one of the great debates of the early days of online activity. The case made for them was that since in the absence of facial expressions or vocal intonations, there needed to be a substitute to let readers know when you were being ironic or were actually angry. Purists regarded them as disgustingly cutesy and also as a chronic source of abuse: people would post nasty comments and try to smooth them over with a :-) Later in the '90s, higher speed connections, unlimited access, and the success of the Worldwide Web made the shorthand unnecessary, but by then it had become an ingrained habit and the usage continued, eventually carrying over to text messaging. Technology is a realm in which, like all those old Web pages preserved forever in search databases, concepts have a kind of immortality. Invented for one need, they get recycled to solve some other problem. Or having failed in one incarnation, they re-emerge successfully in another. Another case in point: again back in the '90s "push" technology — sending information to your computer automatically (a news bulletin, for example, or a sports score) was all the rage. Several companies in Massachusetts were in on the boom, offering software products that put all manner of content on display on your PC's desktop, as screensavers, scrolling banners, whatever. Microsoft even made an ill-fated attempt to build the technology into Windows, calling it "Active Desktop." The feature was notorious for causing PCs to lock up because it overtaxed the hardware. Computer "how-to" articles of the era invariably included as the No. 1 tip for improving Windows performance "turn off Active Desktop." Eventually the push for push died when corporate IT departments found that their networks were being jammed by push downloads. The software was banned, and the idea disappeared. Only to re-emerge again. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to encode Web page content so that it can readily be displayed on another Web page, in a special reader software program, or in most current Web browsers and e-mail programs. The stream of data is called a "feed." Much of the content of a Goggle or Yahoo home page is RSS-based. Thus, such things as news and blog articles can automatically appear on your computer — "push" by another name and using a method that does not drain the bandwidth of computer networks. The breakthrough? RSS could also be called "really short summaries." It sends out a plain-text synopsis of Web content, not the full content, hence less data demand on a network. Similarly, the concept of small specialized applications that formed the basis of Active Desktop also got reborn as "widgets" by a small firm that eventually was acquired by Yahoo. The widget concept was then picked up by Apple and made a part of its Mac OS-X operating system. And to complete the loop, Microsoft then added them, renamed "gadgets," to its Vista operating system. The advance here was to give widgets a common "engine" so your system sees it as akin to having multiple documents open in Microsoft Word rather than running multiple instances of Word, which would overtax your computer. Immortality is a mixed blessing, as thousands of novels and essays on the subject will attest. For example, the idea of content being preserved forever by services created to search and archive content is fraught with peril. There already have been numerous cases where old Internet postings or MySpace/Facebook content has led to public embarrassment or worse for everyone from political bigwigs to high school students. Nevertheless it is comforting to know that if an idea is conceptually sound even if its original implementation goes awry, technology has the power to evolve and eventually bring that idea into wider and successful use. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, it often is more productive to focus instead on finding ways to make the wheel more useful. Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.
—
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.