CLICK
Things I Have Clicked On This Week
Hi everyone, here are some things I clicked on in the past week.
Hajime Tachibana - XP41
I recently heard this Hajime Tachibana track on a Boards of Canada mix for NTS from 2019 called “Boards of Canada - Societas X Tape”, shared by my friend, Nick in Montreal. The BoC mix is very good, and there are definite standouts, but the simplicity of this banger caught my ear.
Nestled in the mix beside fellow Japanese songsmiths, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the wonderful Greek pianist and composer, Lena Platonos, this 1985 release fits perfectly.
I dug around a bit to learn more about the song and found out that Devo’s own (I have to mention their Akron, Ohio home) Mark Mothersbaugh co-wrote it. On the LP’s credits, his name is no where to be found, but more digging took me to one of my favorite online haunts, Discogs.com. In the comments, someone brought up the Mothersbaugh connection looking for verification that he did in fact co-write this song.
This took me to a Devo fan website called Booji Boy’s Basement showing a CD, that I assume is some sort of bootleg, simply called Hajime Tachibana & Mark Mothersbaugh Collaborations (1985-1990). The first track there is XP41 with the note (co-written by MM).
Cool, but … I can’t stop there … I have to keep clicking. My incessant clicking took me to a Google Groups page archived from July, 1999 (25 years ago!).
This leads me to Usenet. I remember Usenet as a kid, however, I started going online in the mid-1990s as a child. I remember first getting a notecard from our public library with the phone number of a server you could connect to to gain Internet access. Then, my Dad signed us up for CompuServe, then Prodigy, and finally AOL 2.5.
Fast forward to 2024, and Google Groups are where Google has archived all the Usenet forums from before the proliferation of the World Wide Web (early-to-mid-1990s). I felt like my definition of Usenet was too clunky so I got ChatGPT to define it for me.
Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system that was created in the early 1980s, long before the World Wide Web became popular. It consists of a large number of newsgroups, which are categories for discussions on various topics. Users post messages to these newsgroups, and the messages are then distributed to other servers and users.
You know how Reddit has subreddits? That same structure was used before the web in Usenet, for every topic imaginable. Each category had sub-categories and those sub-categories were known as ‘newsgroups’. It looked like this …
On February 22nd, 2024 Google Groups ended support for Usenet. I suppose it makes sense since it’s 40+ year old technology, operating on a platform that hosts sooo many websites, but there’s some pretty fascinating, and historical Usenet posts to look through.
At one point, Google profiled some of the most historic Usenet posts, but that’s gone now so I did some digging and here are some of my favorite old Usenet posts
Oldest post on archive, 5/11/1981: https://groups.google.com/g/net.general/c/yJn8WHlzc7U
First mention of AIDS, 10/20/1982 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/n ... fb3y5cGlIJ
The first post from Germany as the Berlin Wall came down: 'As we sit here in West Berlin this morning, we are just discussing the news about the wall - it's open and may soon be no more!', 11/10/89 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/e ... _hhAk9jd8J
The birth of AOL, 9/12/89 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/c ... FqhCfXGloJ
The first mention of a Compact Disc (CD), 7/26/1982 https://groups.google.com/g/net.audio/c/BUomuZAIEZM/m/AH5p31AGE9wJ
The first mention of Osama bin Laden, 8/4/93 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/t ... tvIFr4go8J
First mention of the Taliban, 2/4/95 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/s ... abo5WVnhQJ
The first mention of Google, 3/30/98 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/c ... fkfNDom1sJ
I think what’s cool about the USENET archives is that a Canadian computer programmer working in the zoology department at University of Toronto named Henry Spencer preserved 10 years of Usenet messages onto magnetic tapes. Over 2 million messages, on tape! Then, a computer programmer named David Wiseman at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (two hour drive west of Toronto) managed to extract the information from the tapes and put them onto the web. Below is David Wiseman and the tapes. Wise man, indeed.
I’m pretty interested in how information is saved and how information is shared. I’m pretty astonished that, according to the Pew Research Center - “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later”.
It seems as though the ephemeral nature of digital media isn’t as ephemeral as we once thought. It’s kind of nuts that we have information from the early days of Usenet, thanks to eager archivists, but the Web as we know it, is suffering from Link Rot. Part of this, I believe, is that the Web has been siloed by a handful of extremely powerful corporations. There’s no real incentive for these mega corporations to archive the web and the content within it, but rather, the incentive is to maximize corporate profits for shareholders, and iterate their product. Since most of the major websites are offered to users for free, in exchange for our all important personal data, the past is only used to iterate to the future of the product, with very little importance placed on the data the users have uploaded onto the Web.
The ability to surf through old forums, Usenet posts, and vintage social media is becoming a lost art, but it’s important! The fleeting nature of social media has shifted focus to the always present. I have to imagine, a very small percentage of posts go viral, leaving millions of posts and pieces of media to get pushed down the algorithmic ladder into obscurity.
I have no prescription other than to save your data, protect your data, and support The Internet Archive!
Thanks to the work of archivists before me, I was able to figure out that Mark Mothersbaugh WAS in fact a co-writer of Hajime Tachibana - XP41!
Until next time …