The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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6:58pm on Wednesday, 26th July, 2017:
Anecdote
I spent an hour today being interviewed by games and technology journalist, Aleks Krotoski, for a BBC series she's doing about the development of the Internet. I've known her for several years (I lost part of a tooth once at an event we were both speaking at) (not her fault); she's actually Dr Aleks, but I can't help but read that as Daleks so I try to avoid writing it down. For reasons something to do with the removal of sewers, today she was broadcasting from inside a closet where the hanging clothes would cut down on echoes. So, Narnia, then.
I've done many interviews about the early days of MUD over the years, but Aleks asked me a series of questions today that I've never been asked before, to do with the culture back then and how it did or didn't affect the Internet today. They were really interesting, and I had to think to answer some of them. Of course, I could have just made up the answers because she's no way of checking, but I wanted to know the answers myself. Why was I able to log on to MIT without needing a password, just a user ID I supplied myself?
As with all such interviews, I'll be lucky if two minutes of it make it to the final edit. Still, I enjoyed the discussion, and will be trying to catch the rest of the series when it airs.
The university's media suite is better than the one the BBC used to have in Colchester, which they closed during budget cuts a few years ago. I hope the organisation spends more of the money it saved on journalists the quality of Aleks rather than on presenters who, if they want higher salaries, are welcome to move to commercial broadcasters to try to obtain them.
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Copyright © 2017 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).