1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

Paint me a picture of what you think that looks like. Here’s my painting: Everybody marches on their capitals, everyone gets gunned down with 30mm cannonfire, the Americans are gunned down holding pistols and rifles everyone else is gunned down holding pitchforks and torches.

You want to test that “Fediverse Freedom” say “every billionaire in the world, their wives, parents and children shall be torn apart with random farming machinery and/or prostituted to death whichever is funnier” and see what happens.

How does the web interface collect the transmissions?

The person or organization hosting the website has an antenna somewhere attached to a Software Defined Radio, or SDR. I honestly don’t know how these work at the silicon level, but radio antenna feed line goes in one side, some JFM happens, and USB and/or PCIe computer data comes out the other end. Instead of tuning into such and such frequency with such and such modulation, it sends the raw RF data to the computer to let it process it digitally, with algorithms and GFLOPS and RAM and shit.

Which means, you get to tell it “process the data as if you’re a single-sideband radio listening on 14.070MHz Upper Sideband” and you can listen into amateur radio slow scan television. It’s basically like you get to remote control someone else’s radio receiver.

Are all the transmissions made digitally accessible with the interface?

No. See the above “A person has an antenna somewhere.” You can hear what that antenna hears. This will be limited to line of sight for VHF and up, and even HF will be limited by propagation conditions and the nature of the antenna. The hardware they’ve hooked to their computer may also have its own limitations. Also, their antenna is imperfect because there is no such thing. This is the world’s shittiest Wi-Fi antenna (only partially because it fell over).

Why (other than cost) would I want to use a web interface rather than a traditional receiver?

Not all radio transmissions can be heard from everywhere. I can’t hear anything above 12 meters out of eastern Europe from here, not in the worst solar cycle since humans learned the sun has cycles. I can hear it loud and clear from some Frenchman who put his SDR online.

Don’t fuck around with the FCC, it stands for Fucking Consequences, Cunt!

No, only the British are dumb enough to require a license for a receiver.

You can go buy whatever radio you want and listen to hams tell each other where they’re from and lie about how well they’re hearing each other. Which is most of what they do on shortwave. 1. Ham radio is a game to most of them, the game is “exchange callsigns with people from as many places as you can.” 2. There is a law (CFR 97.113(5)) that prohibits “Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.” I read that as it’s illegal to have a weekly Wednesday at 5 PM EDT chat with your buddy in Tuscon on 20 meters because the cell phone network can also accomplish that. So are scheduled ragchew nets legal?

If you’re going to play around with an HF receiver, ignore the hams and listen out for numbers stations, they’re way fucking cooler than us licensed radio dorks.

Don’t transmit without a license. If we can hear you, we can find you. Radio isn’t like the internet, radio travels in straight (ish) lines. You’re literally shining a light into the sky, we can tell where it’s coming from. Hams won’t do anything to you. No, that’s what the FCC is for.

Never really got the problem with opening with “hey.”

In person, she’ll look like a defecating sphincter if she completely ignores you, so you’ll at least get a “hey” back, and you can play it from the energy she responds with, go earnest, go smooth, go funny, go away, etc. What do you want me to do, compose a fucking sonnet out of the profile you didn’t even fill out? “Soft, she who likes dogs and is very laid back, I know which one of the four girls in her profile photo I hope she is?”

So it got enough eyes on the platform to serve them ads or subscriptions or whatever their monetization strategy was…did the product ever once function as advertised?

Did that ever…work?

Here is the way I understand it:

Microsoft got to be as big as it is because they were the ones sitting at the table when IBM made the biggest whoopsie in all of business. They negotiated a non-exclusive license to MS-DOS for the Intel Reference Design PC they were slapping together. The only thing that was proprietary to IBM about the 5150 PC was the BIOS. Well other companies like Compaq engineered a non-infringing BIOS and were able to bring a 100% compatible competitor to the market. That, plus Intel being required to license the x86 architecture to AMD so that there could be second party suppliers if when Intel shit the bucket, made the PC a mostly open platform. Many companies made or make PCs, lots of companies publish software for Windows (or DOS before it).

I will continue to call even modern PCs “x86”, mostly to hurt sepi’s feelings at this point.

Apple, meanwhile, maintains a death grip on their vertically integrated empire. Only they sell the hardware, only they distribute the operating system, they either make the software in-house or vendors must work closely with them to publish software on their stores.

Then you’ve got Linux, who showed up and used whatever hardware was available.

Windows on x86 PCs is a closed source, open ecosystem. You can cobble the hardware together from a number of vendors, and software is usually distributed as closed source pre-compiled binaries–compiled for x86 or later, sometimes with in-line handwritten assembly. An anti-competitive streak plus the complacency that comes with being a big successful business has made Microsoft unable to realistically make a platform switch. They used the difficulty of decompiling compiled binaries as a method of copy protection for too long, and now important people NEED very old software to work on new hardware and all the loose standards are so ugly that no it’s really not plausible to make Windows for ARM without breaking a lot of legacy applications. Just in gaming. Think of how many games are out there that the publishers are either defunct or just moved on from their old games. The source code is gone or they were made in an old version of Unity that requires features that don’t work anymore so even if you have the old project files it’s difficult if not impossible to work on anymore, so how many games would Microsoft orphan if they said “Oops all ARM now?” And then it’s not just gaming, it’s all the MRI machines and city transit systems and airport systems and banks and credit cards that were built for some old version of Windows and are still in use as they were…they just…can’t abandon the x86 architecture.

Apple is a closed source closed ecosystem. It has such a firm grip on both the hardware itself and the APIs that third party software developers may use that they can accomplish “We’re switching from Motorola PowerPC to Intel x86 now” or “We’re switching from Intel x86 to AppleSilicon ARM now.” They can make the same toolchains output to different architectures or write working translation layers like Rosetta to get those transitions made relatively seamlessly for end users. It does mean you’re locked into one hardware vendor and pretty much one software source.

Linux is an open source, open ecosystem. The second a new architecture is added to GCC, Linux will be compiled for it. Debian Linux for RISC-V was available before there was silicon to run it on. Because most software for Linux is open source, anyone who wants to can compile it for different architectures. Most of Desktop End User Linux is de facto on x86 PCs designed for Windows is because that’s the hardware that’s widely commercially available. There is the problem that things like Wine and Proton don’t bridge the gap between architectures so people playing Windows games on Linux will have the same issue that Windows does on ARM hardware, but the open source ecosystem itself can just slide around.

Which is a superset of x86; my AMD gaming machine can trace its roots all the way back to the IBM-5150.

Does that include Wi-Fi or cellular modems or any of the other shit they make, or just x86 CPUs?

I’ve been saying it, but I think there’s also a factor that people simply want somewhere new to go. I can’t think of a time when people went back to an older platform while abandoning a newer one.

I think there’s a simple desire to move to pastures new. “Use Instagrmam or Youtube Shorts or Snapchat” No, we’ve been there and done that.

If I can rant a bit…

I used to do my daily journal as plaintext in Vim. I wanted something that was a little more capable and in RedNotebook I almost got it. It stores plaintext markup (I think yaml?), the thing is it has an edit and a display mode, and you can’t edit it in display mode. Inserting a picture is pasting a file path to where that picture is stored. If I linked to where the pictures are stored in my ~/Pictures directory, if I ever migrated from Rednotebook or Linux or anything like that, the links to those pictures would break. So I store teh pictures I link in my journal in a subdirectory alongside the journal itself, so the pics should go with it and it should survive a transfer easier.

This is, of course, extremely user unfriendly to do, because it would mean copying pictures, reducing their resolution so they don’t take up the entire damn journal window, and then working through RedNotebook’s interface to navigate to where I just stored that picture to generate the link.

Or, I wrote a couple lines of Bash that did most of that for me and put the file path link in the primary buffer so I could open my file browser, right click, select Add To Journal, and then middle click in my journal. Felt kind of clever coming up with that one, and I kind of wish A) it was a bit easier and B) we lived more in a world where we did that kind of thing where things interoperated more than trying to silo things.

Imagine what Rockefeller and Carnegie would have tweeted about. You know they were crass, detached from reality hemorrhoid clusters, they just didn’t get to spew it to a global audience 900 times a day.

You’re applying very 1990s thinking to internet advertising. They have ways of telling which ads lead to clickthroughs and sales. You say “We got 100 million viewers!” They say “cool, we’ll run ads on your program and give you five cents every time the unique link in those ads results in a purchase.”

I’m pretty sure no one else has my shell script that takes a picture, uses imagemagick to copy a scaled down version of it to a special folder, and then build a string that allows me to just middle click paste the image into Rednotebook so it appears correctly.

Okay, so if you’re doing something like a craft business and putting your portfolio out, Pixelfed can do that. Probably don’t do personal shit.

i already own my tools though.