Veronica and Archie
In the early 90s, on Saturdays between my orchestra rehearsals in the morning and my violin workshops in the afternoon, my father would bring me up to his office in downtown Ottawa. While he’d pour over documents, I’d eat my lunch and look over whatever newsletters were lying about. It was there that I read about FTP and new-fangled protocols Gopher and Archie and search engines like Veronica.
At that point, WWW might as well stood for Wild Wild West. It wasn’t clear which protocols that were running on the Internet would be embraced. It seemed like there was a lot of excitement and room to try out new and ridiculous ideas.
This is how voice was when we were starting out with the Ubi. It wasn’t clear what you could do and how you could do it. It’s still cementing. Today, technologies like AI generative tools are also creating a bit of this Wild West field. New microblogging platforms like Mastodon might also open up a similar Wild West.
And in the Wild West there’s opportunity.
