Stuff That Used to Happen in Ontario

See Nima Alkhorshid talking with Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson. 

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Interview with Nicole Amaral, Director and sole employee of the Digital Kitchener Innovation Lab. 

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Velocity in 2009:


... and in 2017 various people had sold their startups to Microsoft and Google: 

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About 14 miles away there is another University at Guelph where the CoSy conferencing system was developed. It was like a user-friendly private version of Usenet. That software changed the world. You can get the source code from here: https://cosy.sourceforge.net/.

The CoSy system inspired me to try to make a better one. It also set up some expectations for social media which for some reason were never met by any commercial social media systems I have seen. One of those was that there were different spaces where one could interact with different groups of people and where one could imagine different social norms could pertain. For example you had places (conferences) where could go to practice French, or FORTRAN. The other possibility it raised was that of having different front-ends, though I don't think the software had a socket-level protocol, that could have been added and that would have allowed users to build their own UIs, and then it would have not been too much of a leap to allow different data formatting rules for different media types, etc. etc. Then the next stage would have been to formally define the media types and display/input protocols so that software could be developed to handle the various media, and it went on and on. So most of what I know about computing was stuff I learned whilst trying to understand the best way to do these things. In the mean time all this crap like HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, WebAssembly and WebSockets happened,...  You could build a great conferencing system on top of that, but everybody is on FaceBook, Instagram and X which are all built on this same crap, but they don't connect together. Why? 

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