From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sun Sep 08 2002 - 11:50:06 MDT
On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 11:31 pm, Max More wrote:
> At 01:52 PM 9/7/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> I just added a new article to Betterhumans that started out as an
>> examination of how Transhumanists discovered the movement. After
>> contacting several, I realized that without the Internet there would
>> be no Transhumanism. That became my theme. An obvious point, maybe,
>> but only if you're involved in Transhumanism already. And hopefully
>> future historians will find it useful, when Transhumanism changes
>> the world :)
>
> Simon: I haven't read your article, but if it is consistent with your
> summary here, I think it will be seriously misleading.
>
> There *was* transhumanism before anyone used the Internet. (Apart
> from a tiny number of IT specialists. I'm talking about before
> 1991-93 or so.) Extropy magazine started in 1988 and had grown
> substantially before anyone found us via email, and certainly before
> anyone outside CERN in Switzerland was using the Web. And Extropy was
> not the first transhumanist attractor, although I think it was the
> first modern and enduring one. For instance, FM-2030, author of "Are
> You a Transhuman" had regular gatherings of transhumanists before the
> Web existed, and Natasha Vita-More's earliest transhumanist work was
> also earlier.
>
> The Internet and the Web have certainly been a *tremendous* boon to
> transhumanism, but it is quite false to claim that "without the
> Internet there would be no Transhumanism".
Excellent point, Max. It is sometime depressing how little history
people know about transhumanism and technology in general. We see the
same new ideas, the same new inventions, and the same new proposals
year after years, sometimes decade after decade. People think all
this great stuff is new. They have no idea how old some of this stuff
is. Everybody seems to assume that what they just discovered today
was invented yesterday.
Extropy magazine started in 1988.
The Internet didn't allow public access until Arpanet was
decommissioned as a military network in 1990.
Most PC hadn't converted to Windows 3.0 which came out in 1990.
Networking was added to Windows 3.1 in 1992.
Mosaic announced the first graphical web browser in 1993.
Netscape started work on their browser in 1994.
Extropians and Transhumanists were well underway years before most
people had heard of a gui interface, before the Internet became
publicly available, and before the World Wide Web was invented. The
Internet is one of our favorite tools, but we were progressing nicely
before it gained widespread use.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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