I begin this article with the word...."Baud". The reason for this is simple, the word was the equivalent of horsepower to a gen x computer geek. In the dark ages I was the co-administrator of a BBS called "The Pig Sty". To access this analog text based work of art you needed the com power of acoustic couplers. This was a complicated effort and several pieces of technological equipment was needed to achieve the connectivity. A telephone, invented by Alexander Bell, was the key. The telephone handset was placed into a receptacle that transmitted acoustic code to a mainframe computer that hosted on its hard drive all of the data that made up "The Pig Sty". The acoustic code was received by a telephone connected to the mainframe computer that was routed through a "truncated" switch system that allowed multiple users. The receptacle device on the users end was called a modem and the speed in which it transmitted data was measured by what was known as a baud rate. My modem was able to transmit and receive data at a baud rate up to 2400 bauds per second. This blazing connection speed allowed the user to experience all that "The Pig Sty" had to offer including a directory of phone numbers needed to access other interesting places that may or may not have been legal to publish at the time. This was the original internet and for those of us that had the equipment and knowledge, it was the future of telecommunications.

The purpose of telling that story is to put into perspective how far we have come with the development of the world wide web. Access is automatic, we are lterally swimming in the radio waves that contain the data of millions of "Pig Styś". We were not engineers in the common definition but we were some of the first to stake a claim and begin the formation of the ecosystem. The old guys that hacked into university computers and created the BBS environment layed the foundation for what is before you now. The API , the Blockchain, Python, Java, Ruby....all the dreams of visionaries that were once blown away the first time they typed "goto10" and it worked. Never take it for granted. This is the greatest communication tool created by man.

So ends my first article on the /novusone platform....."A Brief History of Nothing Important". written by an old guy that dreamed once and now has racks of servers in Cogent data centers somewhere in the desert and holds a special appreciation for "developers". who will be old guys one day too.

S.H. Aken