connected

Lo was, according to the New Yorker, this indisputable beacon of authority, this inexhaustible source of trivia, my personal holy book of miscellanea, the content of the first message ever exchanged between two computers. This was forty years ago today. The message was supposed to read login, but the network crashed somewhere between the transmission of the second and the third byte.

Forty years is a bloody long in most people's lives, but in technology it's an eternity, comprising several cycles of obsolescence and rebirth. Still, every time I care to look, I'm amazed and lost for words to see how far we've come. These days, the internet is ubiquitous, pervasive and instantaneous. To no one's surprise, this post continuous after its auspicious first word, for a word it is, as if that were the normal course of things.

Also taken for granted these days is to video chat with friends or telephone them, listen to the radio, live or from a deep chest of archived treasures, watch TV or entire movies, all over the internet. None of this raises an eyebrow.

My eyebrows were raised this evening when I got home and found an envelope in the mail, addressed to the "resident" of my flat but in contrast to all the other junk mail I toss without even noticing its provenience endorsed by hand. My curiosity was tickled as I read that a mysterious visitor has missed me this afternoon at 2:47pm. He or she assured me that he'd be back (or she) but didn't say for what purpose.

I took the letter in with me and opened it over dinner – bronze-die tortiliogni and tomato and chili sauce as I had had only a measly sandwich for lunch – and was astonished and disappointed to find yet another message from the TV Licensing Authority. These guys' misdirected persistence is quite annoying and would be truly exasperating if it were my money they were wasting.

You see, in the UK, you need to pay a quarterly fee to operate a TV set legally. The fee, it its opulent entirety, goes to the BBC to ensure quality programming, to every viewer's benefit, I think. The commercial stations, which don't receive handouts, have to up their quality to compete with the BBC. Consequently, British TV has an excellent reputation.

As I don't have a TV, I don't know if that's deserved, but I do know that I resent the relentless attention by the Licensing Authority. I'm not serious in my anger, though, because every now and then, I turn to the iPlayer. This little bit of web 2.0, its development funded by the licensing fee, offers select programs after they've been shown on TV. It's brilliant, much better than TV. I can watch what I want when I want to, and I'm under no obligation to pay a thing. And thanks to the work of forty years, all shows stream in high quality and without interruptions. Happy birthday, internet.