Anyone have a non-paywall version?

I agree that if the shoes were perfectly good, it would have been better to keep them. Are you asserting the author recycled perfectly good shoes, or are you just describing a hypothetical? If the former, what in the article suggests the shoes were still perfectly good?

As late as the 70’s, you could get in trouble with the local telco for using an acoustic coupler on a residential phone line.

Another in this genre: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

Quoting from aphyr as it still brings me joy and might encourage others to read through the interview pages there,

> “In Lisp,” you offer. “We often write domain-specific languages to solve new problems.”

> “C is not a DSL!”

> “If you insist.” Keep going anyway.

My favorite:

> The Church. The lambda calculus. The gay agenda. It has known a thousand names, a thousand forms.

Why gay agenda though? What is the connection?

It's a reference to the Church-Turing Thesis, the latter namesake having been persecuted for "homosexual acts" and forced to undergo chemical castration.

This (along with several others) is linked at the top of the article.

That would depend on the restrictions accompanying the money. The federal government has had mixed success funding technology projects. The Feds aren’t necessarily experts at solving state/local-level problems.

I used the MV/8000 at a SCADA company where I worked part-time in college. It was a nice step up from the 16-bit DG Nova machines we used earlier.

Wasn’t there a startup that did this in the late 90’s?

There have been a bunch of these companies. We started one company in 1999, which we eventually moved to San Francisco. We built sticky notes which were stored together with a cash copy of the website on our servers. So one could collaborate around the notes in a corporate environment. Funding dried up in the dotcom crash, so we went home again. (An interesting side note to that was that the CIA wanted our stuff to build something for the presidents office, but decided against it, probably for security reasons. At least I got a trip to Washington DC out of it and meeting CIA CTOs or equivalents. Interesting times.)

Other companies built public note systems. I think I have seen another four or five since then that have tried to make a business around sticky notes in websites, but nothing seems to… stick (ahem).

People seem to want to give internal feedback to the content team on PDFs or in emails.

One of the original browsers, maybe Netscape, had comments on pages, but it got removed early on.

Edit: added note about CIA.

That's very cool.

Third Voice[0] did shared annotation in ‘99.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

Say Yes to WebStickies :P

I remember something where you could doodle and comment on any website, but pages usually devolved into spam and drawings of... you can imagine.

I thought this was Google’s initial goal.

That's funny. I remember news reports about how Japanese consumers didn't want to buy American-made cars because of the perception that Japanese cars were higher quality. The salesmen tried to explain that American consumers didn't care about things like panel gaps or wind noise of door closing bump noise.

The value of your open source project is not a function of how many trolls spew vitriol about it. There will always be trolls. They’re background noise.

I talked to someone who had a similar experience in New Zealand. As I understand it, this kind of treatment is more common in countries where the employment laws make it hard to fire someone. It is also more common when the employee's severance package is large and the employer is not just disappointed but upset with the employee.