OT: what's with the 'i'?

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 05:17:15PM +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > I'd think it's the coolness thing. But highly intelligent people do it
> > occasionally, so I have no clue either.
> Yes, some of the Bell Labs people including none other than Ken Thompson
> were known for doing this, but ken gets a pass for obvious reasons :-)

Back in the anything-goes days when e-mail was young, there was considerable
experimentation with neglecting the conventional rules of punctuation in the
new medium. Everyone you might converse with was part of a relatively small
tech-savvy group, and everyone was part of building something new and
exciting. (Please pause for a second here to imagine something cyberpunk, in
its early-80s form.)

As the Internet grew, things changed. After the Eternal September, there was
a new supply of people who weren't trying a new medium so much as they were
actually unable to form coherent sentences in the first place, making doing
so as an affectation considerably less cool. (Now image the movie
"Hackers".) But also, the scope of activity depending on e-mail grew --
including, very serious business. With that, it turns out that the
old-fashioned techniques of communicating coherently weren't so bad after
all.

On the other hand, some of the new conventions did stick, like using an
extra blank line as a paragraph marker rather than indenting the first line.
Also, smilies.

And now back to our regularly scheduled Fedora list?

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>