Status-Q

There are some very strange people in the world. I can say this confidently, because I know there are a few of you who have been reading Status-Q since it first began, and, amazing though it seems to me, that was ten years ago today.

As a child, I often thought about keeping a diary, but was afraid to record my innermost thoughts because I thought someone else might find it and read them. When the web came along, I overcame this by going to the other extreme. Though, really, Status-Q came about when I started writing odd notes for myself, never really expecting anybody else to read them. Now, as time’s winged chariot drives me ever onward, I find it increasingly useful as an aide-memoire: the little search box in the top right corner is ever more handy!

I had, in fact, created a weblog-type-thing rather earlier, in fact – way back in about 1993. It was more of a lab notebook and it ran on a custom web server I had written in Perl, simply as an experiment to see whether you could make web pages that could be modified through the browser. It was only accessible to people on the local network and I didn’t keep it up for long. But in Feb 2001 I registered my first domain and, using Dave Winer’s eccentric but groundbreaking Radio Userland software, I started jotting things down more regularly.

My early posts were brief notes on things like:

• What is this new XML thing people are talking about? Will it really replace HTML? If not, is it important anyway?
• This Windows 2000 is probably the first decent OS to come out of Redmond. I wonder if people will go for it instead of Windows ME?
• I have three machines on my desk now – one running Windows, one running Linux, and one running the pre-release version of this new Mac OS X. Even in its early form, I’m starting to realise that if I could only keep one machine, I’d want it to be the Mac…
• Can’t believe that the biggest Unix-vendor in the world is about to be, of all people, Apple!
• Microsoft has a new buzzword – .NET. Nobody seems to know what it means, including them.
• Surveys are saying that the majority of US students are no longer taking hi-fi systems to college – they’re getting their music from PCs….
• Microsoft’s pushing a type of machine they call the TabletPC. Don’t think it’ll fly…

To all of you who have made it through the intervening 2000-or-so posts, for whatever misguided reasons of your own, you have my sincere gratitude and respect!