http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0425171698/qid=1030410392/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-5510120-9223360?s=books&n=507846

"When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century," by Carolyn Marvin, compares the telegraph, telephone and electric lights with the Internet. (She makes a case why electric lights should be considered a communication technology.) The book is interesting in that she, unlike the author of "Victorian Internet," was published in 1990, before the Internet became mainstream, nonetheless she anticipates many of the issues that came up during the Internet boom: most notably, she writes about concerns that the telephone would break up the family order by placing suitors and daughters in touch with each other without parental supervision.

(I mentioned this last bit in a superior fashion in another online discussion, only to receive a response that the fathers were right to worry about those things in the 19th Century - they feared that the telephone would destroy the family order as they knew it, AND IT DID. We think those fathers were quaint and funny because we grew up in the world they feared.)

Another other bit I remember from the Marvin book is that there was a thriving culture of electrical engineering trade press. Those writers didn't just see themselves as writing engineering news, or business news - they saw themselves, together with the engineers they were writing for, as being CUSTODIANS, and even spiritual leaders, of the changes that were being wrought by the new technology. I've been working in the computer trade press 13 years now, and that sentiment is very familiar to me.

Of course, one of the last of the electrical engineering trades from the boom years was edited by a fella named Hugo Gernsback who decided to publish some "scientifiction" as a change of pace, which begat John Campbell, whose begats extend in linear fasion to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, whose novels "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" were bibles to the pioneers of today's Internet and so everything turns out to be related after all.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195063414/qid=1030410576/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-5510120-9223360?s=books

It was an oldish book in the library at Columbia: quarto, with green boards. So far even Google can't do much with that.

And no, it wasn't William Ashbless. Earlier than that.

Dale Speirs has produced many interesting articles in his fanzine Opuntia, covering historical forerunners of fandom.

It is a True Fact, for example, that Usenet's Great Renaming (the creation of the rec.*, soc.*, sci.* etc. hierarchies) was postponed from its originally scheduled date of Sept. 1, 1986, because too many members of the Usenet Cabal would be away at Confederation, the Atlanta worldcon, at the time. (Many of them, as I recall, were even working ops at the con.)

x^2 + y^2 = 8
x + xy = 6

The answer is described as being x=2, y=2; the flames were over how one would "prove" that this is the answer.

But it's not the only answer. There's another real solution at approximately x=2.393955784, y=1.506311955. I think there are couple of complex solutions too, but that's cheating.

It's no wonder this was so hard to attack using the algebraic methods known to the young readership; it's equivalent to a quartic equation. These can be solved analytically but it's not pretty.

Signed,
Pre-digital fart-faced jackass Bob

"August 26th, Monday 2002 -- In order to prevent future abuse, FanFiction.Net's Upload Guideline has been modified to clearly bar any form of message board style entries: Any form of entry that would use the review system as a message board: "Ask...", interactive, and etc."

Yes, indeed. Review board abuse. They need to get a double-back-action high-pressure condensatory manipulator. (I saw one of those being auctioned off on Ebay just the other day. Maybe they got it?)

Further discussion at the Godawful Fan Fiction message board (http://www.voy.com/13774/)

Now that I know where he stands on solutions to quartic equations, of course, I wouldn't piss down his throat if his guts was afire.