Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Internet History: The Rise of the Blog

Saturday, 23 September 2023
Bob Leggitt

Charting the weblog's rise to global significance, from the primordial soup of the early net to the big league platforms of the mid to late noughties.

A WordPress Blog with a colourful, dark-mode look
The humble blog eventually became one of the world's key information-sources.

In terms of the public attention it’s managed to grab, blogging has arguably upstaged some of the most powerful forms of entertainment on Earth. But its beginnings were humble, to the point that most of the tech industry considered it a lost cause. How things changed.

In this post, we'll take a journey back through time, to revisit and analyse the birth, tepid ascendancy and explosion of the blog, in the days before it was robbed of its role by social media, and was reinvented as a commercially-run content-marketing machine. In the days before building a successful blog required a business development manager, a multi-skilled creative team, full-stack coders, a planning division and an outreach budget. At one time, creating a blog post was no more demanding than writing a Mastodon post. No title. Just a date for a heading and a small block of top-of-the-head text.

Word Processing Software: Revolution Pending?

Thursday, 5 May 2022
Bob Leggitt
“The divide between the progress of the Internet and the progress of the word processor could not be more stark. The word processor launches to something that looks barely any different today than it looked decades ago.”
Microsoft Office Word 2003

Do you remember the days of WordStar, when a mouse was just a rather timid rodent that inadvertently antagonised cats and fantasised about processed cheese? If you're too young to know what I’m rambling on about, WordStar was the premier word processor of the 1980s, and it primarily existed on computers with non-graphical operating systems.

For the majority of PC users there was no mouse. Every instruction to a PC program had to come via the keyboard. And because the era's foremost operating system - DOS - had no graphical capability, the word processor couldn't represent elements of formatting as literal variations on screen. For a given display resolution, text would always reproduce at the same size, and with the same CP437 styling. It couldn't be italicised on screen, or displayed in bold. And many PCs of the 1980s only had monochromatic monitors, so even colour-coding was off the agenda as a universal means to represent format changes.

Whilst one might imagine that word processing software would be roundly unpopular under such unconducive conditions, offices couldn't get their hands on WordStar fast enough, and sales went through the roof. The software's renowned mail merge capability linked it up with the database behemoth dBASE, and suddenly, SMEs could produce their own mailshots, run off personalised invitations, autoprint customer/client/patient reminder letters... The future had arrived.