Back in time via audio cassettes - Digital Village
Posted: 22 March 2009 at 01:45:49
I recently decided to embark on a journey of digitizing a box full of audio cassettes. Those who knew me growing up--especially when I was in junior high and earlier--know I was always goofing off with a microphone and a tape recorder. I operated a pirate radio station at AM 1630 for a while too. It's broadcast radius covered most of the town of Granger, UT, where I lived.
One of the nuggets I found was actually much later than that. In 1995, I had just published (self-published) a book about the World Wide Web titled Fozziliny George Moo's Guide To The World Wide Web and was asked by a friend to appear on his radio program.
Now, about this friend: His name is Doran Barons. Freaky, right?! My name is Doran Barton! His name is Doran Barons!
He saw a letter I had written to the editors of Wired magazine a few months before (which was subsequently published in Wired) and sent me e-mail to introduce himself. This triggered a series of e-mail exchanged between us which led to him inviting me on his radio program, Digital Village a weekly radio program on KFPK, 90.7FM in Los Angeles, CA.
Digital Village has an online MP3 archive of their radio program going back to 2000 and they've hosted some impressive guests on their radio program like Neal Stephenson (one of my favorite authors), Bruce Sterling (another of my favorite authors), Steve Wozniak (who started Apple with Steve Jobs), Bruce Schneier, and Lawrence "Larry" Lessig. It's cool that I preceded such giants. :-)
After I did the telephone interview with the radio program, Doran sent me a cassette tape of the program and I've digitized it (with Doran's permission). So, if anyone's interested in taking a peek back in time to 1995 to hear about the World Wide Web in its relative infancy, here it is:
It's clear I was fresh from doing lots of research for my book. It's fun listening to me advise one of the show's callers to contact the "site" he was getting his dialup access through to see if they offered anything like PPP, SLIP, or TIA so he could "extend the Internet to his home computer over his dialup line" or he could use lynx at the shell prompt on the Unix system he was dialing into.