1. The OED blog for 2013’s word of the year is online at blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner.
2. Chris Messina’s original Tweet is online at twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412 while Stowe B’yd’s Web Anthropologist blog post Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings is at stoweboyd.com/post/39877198249/hash-tags-twitter-groupings.
3. The 2012 High Court Judgment, concerning the so-called Twitter Joke Trial, can be found in full online at www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/2157.html—Neutral Citation Number: [2012] EWHC 2157 (Admin) Case No: CO/2350/2011 dated July 27, 2012—and is well worth reading closely, not least for the neat King Lear reference in point 28—“we should perhaps add that for those who have the inclination to use ‘Twitter’ for the purpose, Shakespeare can be quoted unbowdlerised, and with Edgar, at the end of King Lear, they are free to speak not what they ought to say, but what they feel.”
4. Delightfully, a scan of both the original July 1, 1948, Bell Labs press release for the transistor is online at www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/pdf/bell-labs%20transistor%20announcement.pdf and of the memorandum and ballot for its naming from May 28, 1948, at www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/pdf/transistorname.pdf.
5. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Fourth Estate, 2011), 3. One of the best and most important books written about computing and digital culture in recent years: you should definitely read it.
6. A pdf of “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” by Gordon E. Moore, Electronics, vol. 38, no. 8 [April 19, 1965] is online at www.monolithic3d.com/uploads/6/0/5/5/6055488/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf.
7. The original message of September 19, 1982, and thread within which Fahlman proposed the emoticon is preserved online at www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm—this was retrieved from the spice vax oct-82 backup tape by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002. The period covered is September 16, 1982, through October 21, 1982.
8. SwiftKey’s emoji analysis report was posted on its blog on April 21, 2015, under the title “Most-Used Emoji Revealed: Americans Love Skulls, Brazilians Love Cats, the French Love Hearts,” blog.swiftkey.com/americans-love-skulls-brazilians-love-cats-swiftkey-emoji-meanings-report.
9. Jeff Howe, “The rise of crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 2006, online at www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html.
10. Keith Houston’s history of @ can be found in two parts online at his Shady Characters blog, beginning at www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-symbol-part-1-of-2, or see his fine book Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities (Particular Books, 2013).
11. For a full account of the “Apple key” story, see Andy Hertzfeld (2004), Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, under the heading “Swedish Campground,” p. 152.
12. The first appearance in print of both “hypertext” and the related notion of “hypermedia” came in Ted Nelson (1965), “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” online at dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806036.
13. This exchange about the origins of computer daemons is reported in full online at ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html.
14. Ward Cunningham’s full “correspondence on the etymology of wiki” is online at c2.com/doc/etymology.html.
15. See Raph Koster’s own account of the nature of nerfing on his website at www.raphkoster.com/gaming/nerfing.shtml.
16. Further details for all metric units and prefixes can be browsed on the official website of the international bureau for weights and measures at www.bipm.org/en/si/si_brochure/chapter3/prefixes.html.
17. Although Tuvalu apparently doesn’t earn as much from its domain as it thinks it should: see “Internet domain riches fail to arrive in Tuvalu,” Independent on Sunday, July 18, 2010, online at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/internet-domain-riches-fail-to-arrive-in-tuvalu2029221.html.
18. See Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Clarendon Press, 2000), 56.
19. See Dennis G. Jerz’s account of the play and the word “robot” at jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/RUR.
20. Asimov’s “Runaround” is collected in I, Robot (Voyager, 2004), with the first mention of “robotics” coming on page 38: “But then, advances in robotics these days were tremendous . . .”
21. The only mention of “cyberspace” in “Burning Chrome” comes in its enigmatic third sentence: “I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven,’ but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.” The full text is online atwww.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rrojas/BurningChrome.htm.
22. In Neuromancer, “cyberspace” is most iconically glossed in this context: “Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a customized cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination known as the matrix.” See William Gibson, Neuromancer (Voyager, 1995), 11–12.
23. A full account of these and other additions to the OED in March 2011—from which the quotation in this paragraph comes—can be found online at public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/previous-updates/march-2011-update.
24. See Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Penguin, 2011), 33: “He is not seeing real people, of course . . . The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.”
25. This passage can be found on page 192 of the “30th anniversary” 2006 paperback edition of The Selfish Gene (OUP), as well as being endlessly quoted online.
26. Heinlein’s explanation of grok comes on p. 322 of the 2007 paperback edition of Stranger in a Strange Land (Hodder).
27. As reported in the Guardian’s account of June 13, 2011, online at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/gay-girldamascus-tom-macmaster.
28. The original European Parliament paper is online at www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/cult/2002/318587/DG-4-CULT_ET(2002)318587_EN.pdf.
29. The story was originally reported in the Gainesville Times on March 1, 2012, online at www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/63990.
30. For further details, see Declan McCullagh’s article for CNET News from April 23, 2004, at news.cnet.com/2100-1032_3-5198125.html.
31. The Washington Post was one of the first to pick up the Tyson Gay story, in Mary Ann Akers’s blog “The Sleuth” on July 1, 2008—see voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2008/07/christian_sites_ban_on_g_word.html.
32. Letter of November 13 1878. For a full account of Edison’s struggles around the electric light at this time, including the quotation in question, see Robert Freidel and Paul B. Israel Edison’s Electric Light (John Hopkins UP, 2010), 19–23.
33. The original log book, complete with original bug, can be found in the National Museum of American History; see americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=30 for details and a selection of images.
34. Perhaps the definitive account of all such bugs can be found within the iconic hacker’s dictionary The Jargon File, a version of which is maintained by Eric S. Raymond at www.catb.org/jargon—or which can be purchased in paperback form as The New Hacker’s Dictionary.
35. Within the game-world of EVE Online, debating how many carebears it takes to feed a griefer really is a genuine, and statistically serious, question, as the debate at forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=347596 illustrates.
36. Taken from page 237 of the 1978 Hutchinson edition of one of Burgess’s most unusual books, 1985.
37. Explore the Ngram Viewer for yourself at books.google.com/ngrams.
38. The full text of Through the Looking Glass can be found online at www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm including this passage introducing the idea of portmanteau words, in which the character of Humpty Dumpty is speaking to Alice: “Well, ‘SLITHY’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
39. See Linda Stone’s own explanation of Continuous Partial Attention at lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention.
40. To be precise, the original coining of the term “Streisand Effect” was on January 5, 2005, in this piece for Techdirt by Mike Masnick, the blog’s editor, www.techdirt.com/articles/20050105/0132239.shtml.
41. See the OED’s March 2012 update, in which “super-injunction” was admitted to the dictionary for the first time, detailed online at public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/previous-updates/june-2012/a-sublime-and-superlative-quarter-of-contrasts.
42. See Alan Rusbridger’s “The Trafigura Fiasco Tears Up the Textbook,” first published on the Guardian website on October 14, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook.
43. A complete text of Three Men in a Boat can be found online at www.gutenberg.org/files/308/308-h/308-h.htm.
44. See research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=76529 for the full paper.
45. See Marc D. Feldman, Maureen Bibby and Susan D. Crites, “‘Virtual’ Factitious Disorders and Munchausen by Proxy,” Western Journal of Medicine, vol. 168, no. 6 [June 1998], online at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1305082/pdf/westjmed00333-0055.pdf.
46. A thorough account of the Kaycee Nicole case and several other famous fictitious online stories can be found at www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/kaycee.asp.
47. See Ben Hammersley, “Audible revolution,” Guardian, February 12, 2004, online at www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.digitalmedia.
48. Detailed information on Gelernter’s early work with Eric Freeman on lifestreaming can be found at cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html while perhaps the earliest citation for the term lifestream itself is an article for the Washington Post of April 3, 1994, called “The Cyber-Road Not Taken,” partly reproduced online at www.wordspy.com/words/lifestreaming.asp.
49. Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy (Routledge, 2008), 260.
50. Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics, September 1960—online at cyberneticzoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cyborgs-Astronautics-sep1960.pdf.
51. A full text of Vinge’s essay can be found online at www. rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html.
52. An excerpt from Kurzweil’s book, including the quoted passage, can be found online at www.npr.org/books/titles/138051148/the-singularity-is-near-when-humans-transcend-biology#excerpt.
53. Google’s full official history of itself can be read online at www.google.co.uk/about/company/history.
54. The exchange takes place on page 120 of the 1995 Heinemann edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts.
55. Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (Penguin, 2005), 3.
56. Those wishing to know everything there is to know about the Pwnies should visit pwnies.com.
57. Google officially labels this the “hacker” language version of its interface: see www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker.
58. The full Word Spy article on “slacktivism” is online at www.wordspy.com/words/slacktivism.asp.
59. A partial transcript of the key “pajamas” exchange was published on September 17, 2004, on the Fox News website at www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132494,00.html.
60. One of the earliest usages I’ve found of “gamification” is from a 2009 “Loyalty Expo” in Hollywood, Florida, as reported in this July 2009 summary at www.scribd.com/doc/17718638/Loyalty-Expo-2009-in-Review.
61. See Steve Mann’s 2002 reference page “sousveillance” at wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm—elements of which, including the first definition of “sousveillance” itself, were first published in March 2002 in the magazine Metal and Flesh under the title “Sousveillance, not just surveillance, in response to terrorism,” online at wearcam.org/metalandflesh.htm.
62. See Ian Kerr’s blog post on “equiveillance” and subsequent comments at www.anonequity.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/exploring_equiv_1.php.
63. Ron Rosenbaum’s original article “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” appeared in Esquire in October 1971; a full scan is online at www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs/rosebaum1971.pdf.
64. The full text of that iconic first spam email is online at www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html—note that, just to make things even worse, the entire message was written in capital letters.
65. A full text of Wolfe’s 1965 essay on McLuhan is online at www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/course/spring96/wolfe.html.
66. It’s extremely difficult to find a source for Newton Love’s origination of the term “CamelCase” other than versions of the story cited on Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase thanks to the vanishing of the original 1995 online discussion at http://users.sluug.org/~newt.
67. The full entry is online at www.bradlands.com/weblog/september_10_1999.
68. The department of linguistics at Lancaster University has a useful glossary of online gaming slang, featuring these and many more terms, at www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/tony/onlineslang.htm.
69. See Bartle’s email exchange about the origins of “mob,” reproduced at mud.wikia.com/wiki/Mob.
70. Hilbert’s 1904 paper was the text of a lecture given at the third international congress of mathematicians at Heidelberg, “On the Foundations of Logic and Arithmetic,” and the idea of proving the internal consistency of mathematics occupied much of his energy over the following decades—until, in 1931, Kurt Gödel’s seminal “incompleteness theorem” formally demonstrated that Hilbert’s aims were impossible.
71. The Hofstadter cartoon is online at xkcd.com/917.
72. Perhaps inevitably, the “talk” section accompanying Wikipedia’s own explanation of its TL;DR policy is itself packed with accusations that the article is too long to read; see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Too_long;_didn’t_read.
73. Know Your Meme offers a usefully illustrated summary of RTFM’s first appearance in print at knowyourmeme.com/memes/rtfm.
74. See Harry McCracken’s “Fanboy! The strange true story of the tech world’s favorite putdown,” posted on May 17, 2010, on the Technologizer blog, at technologizer.com/2010/05/17/fanboy.
75. See the Guild’s official YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/watchtheguild.
76. The Syndicate’s official website is www.llts.org.
77. The “Picard facepalm” is helpfully reproduced, alongside other miscellaneous info, at knowyourmeme.com/memes/facepalm.
78. For a marvelous, detailed history of the Turk and its times, see Tom Standage’s book The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-Playing Machine That Fooled the World (Penguin, 2003).
79. Explore Amazon’s mechanical Turk service online at www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome.
80. The full text of Cory Doctorow’s For the Win is available via his website at http://craphound.com/ftw/download/ under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
81. A useful history of geocaching, as well of information on how to get involved, is online at www.geocaching.com/about/history.aspx.
82. See www.dartmoorletterboxing.org/history%20of%20Letterboxing.htm for more details on Dartmoor letterboxing, including the contents of its first ever instance in 1854, when “a Dartmoor guide named James Perrott placed a glass bottle at Cranmere Pool, and encouraged hikers that made the considerable walk to the site to leave a calling card as a record of their achievement . . .”
83. You can listen to the “song of the grass mud horse” and read further details from the China Digital Times at chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/02/music-video-the-song-of-the-grass-dirt-horse.
84. See “Phrases for lazy writers in kit form” by Geoffrey Pullum, posted on October 27, 2003, on Language Log, at itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000061.html.
85. See “Snowclones: lexicographical dating to the second” by Geoffrey Pullum, posted on January 16, 2004, on Language Log, at itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html.
86. See “Egg Corns: Folk Etymology, Malapropism, Mondegreen, ???” by Mark Liberman, posted on September 23, 2003, on Language Log, at itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000018.html and updated with Pullum’s suggestion of “egg corn” as a term on September 30. For an exhaustive list of eggcorns, the Eggcorn Database at eggcorns.lascribe.net/ is recommended reading.
87. The original “Jargon Watch” column from March 1995 is online at www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/jargon_watch.html.
88. Of all his work, Andrew Keen’s book Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (Constable, 2012) explores these ideas most closely.
89. John Markoff, “Pools of Memory, Waves of Dispute,” New York Times, January 29, 1992, online at www.nytimes.com/1992/01/29/business/business-technology-pools-of-memory-waves-of-dispute.html.
90. See Irving Biederman and E. A. Vessel, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain,” American Scientist, vol. 94 [May–June 2006], online at geon.usc.edu/~biederman/publications/Biederman_Vessel_2006.pdf.
91. See “Infovores & Ignotarians,” July 25, 2006, on The Personal Genome, at thepersonalgenome.com/2006/07/infovores_ignot.
92. Maggie Jones’s essay “Shutting Themselves In,” published in the New York Times on January 15, 2006, is still one of the best places to begin learning about hikikomori, and is online at www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all.
93. See the BBC’s report “Australian Dies After ‘Planking’ on Balcony, Police Say,” from May 15, 2011, atwww.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13389207.
94. One example among many, uploaded on June 11, 2011, is the video “cone-ing at a McDonalds—epic reaction,” which as of September 2012 had a cool 1.3m YouTube views—see www.youtube.com/watch?v=78DBf2_9Esg.
95. The site www.horsemanning.com/ includes historical photos from the 1920s and an extensive guide to the modern revival of the trend (that is, lots of silly photos).
97. Word Spy puts the earliest citation for “meatspace” at February 21, 1993, in the “Austin Cyberspace Journal Newsletter,” and I am unable to find an earlier citation; see www.wordspy.com/words/meatspace.asp.
98. See page 175 of David Gerrold’s When Harlie Was One (Ballantine, 1972), in which one character asks, “You know what a virus is, don’t you? . . . The virus program does the same thing.”
99. See Freeman John Dyson, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” Science, vol. 131 [June 3,1960], online at www.islandone.org/LEOBiblio/SETI1.HTM.
100. Robert Bradbury died at the age of fifty-four in March 2011. A detailed tribute to the man and his work, including the matrioshka brain concept, is online at www.sentientdevelopments.com/2011/03/remembering-robert-bradbury.html.
101. Greg Bear first introduced the Taylor algorithms in his 1988 novel Eternity, explaining that they allow “programs to completely determine the nature of their systems. Thus, a downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded . . .”
102. To be precise, the phrase “commencing interweb link” appeared approximately 14 minutes and 30 seconds into “Eyes,” the sixteenth episode of season one of Babylon 5,—first broadcast on July 13, 1994. See www.imdb.com/title/tt0517650.
103. A full transcript of the third debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry is online at www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-17-2000-debate-transcript—while Bush’s immortal deployments of “internets” came in this context: “Parents are teaching their children right from wrong, and the message oftentimes gets undermined by the popular culture . . . We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries and filters in public schools so if kids get on the Internet, there is not going to be pornography or violence coming in.”
104. See George P. Krapp, The English Language in America, first published in 1925.
105. See Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” online at infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.
106. See The Software Age by Paul Niquette, online at www.niquette.com/books/softword/part0.htm.
107. For more details, see the main Tor Project site at www.torproject.org.
108. For a flavor of Silk Road’s operations, see this story from August 7, 2012, on Ars Technica, under the headline “Study Estimates $2 million a Month in Bitcoin Drug Sales,” arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/study-estimates-2-million-a-month-in-bitcoin-drug-sales.
109. See Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, “Specifications of Internet Transmission Control Program,” December 1974—online at tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675—whose use of the term “internet” followed on from the term “internetworking” in papers such as Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” May 1974—see www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf.
110. See Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (Harper, 1999)—the naming discussion comes on page 23 of this edition.
111. See www.st-isidore.org for full details of the Order of Saint Isidore of Seville’s online activities.
112. As reported on the Vatican’s own news site atwww.news.va/en/news/follow-the-pope-on-twitter-for-lent
113. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (Little, Brown, 2011), 63.
114. “Steve Jobs Almost Named the iMac the MacMan, Until This Guy Stopped Him”—an extract from Ken Segall’s Insanely Simple (Portfolio, 2012)—tells the story in full at www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-the-imac-the-macman-until-this-guy-stopped-him.
115. For a detailed history of Linux and its naming, see Ragib Hasan’s “History of Linux” at netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux.
116. Jennifer Viegas, Pierre Omidyar: The Founder of Ebay (Rosen, 2006), 52.
117. See W. K. English, D. C. Englebart, and Bonnie Huddart, “Computer-Aided Display Control Final Report,” July 1, 1965, online atarchive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19660020914.
118. The episode, “Lisa’s Wedding,” was first broadcast on March 26, 1995; a full script can be read online at www.snpp.com/episodes/2F15.html including the immortal line: “Bart: [pause] Meh.”
119. There’s a detailed and useful discussion of “meh” on the Language Hat blog from April 13, 2007, online at www.languagehat.com/archives/002716.php.
120. See “Word Featured in The Simpsons Becomes Latest Addition to Collins English Dictionary,” Daily Telegraph, November 16, 2008, online at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3467717/Word-featured-in-The-Simpsons-becomes-latest-addition-to-Collins-English-Dictionary.html.
121. Sam Leith, “‘Meh’ Is More Useful Than ‘Weaselnose,’” Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2008, online at www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3563562/Meh-is-more-useful-than-weaselnose.html.
122. The original exchange, dated October 19, 2004, remains online in the comments section at onepamop.livejournal.com/240305.html?thread=2071217#t2071217 (and is long, obscene, and often extremely hard to follow).
123. Wikipedia has a scan of the image at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newsweek_preved.jpg.
124. Wikipedia also features an entry dedicated to “bear surprise,” complete with an image of the original painting, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_surprise.
125. Werner Buchholz, “The System Design of the IBM Type 701 Computer,” first published October 1953 in the Proceedings of the I.R.E., vol. 41, no.10, online at ieeexplore.ieee.org.
126. This discussion on Word Origins is one of several places to tell the Andy Williams story about the origins of cookies, word originsorg.yuku.com/topic/6654#.UF9wso1mSIo.
127. Lou Montulli lies behind quite a few other innovations too. As he puts it on his own website at www.montulli.org/lou, “I’m largely to blame for several innovations on the web, including cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, proxy authentication, HTTP byte ranges, HTTPS over SSL, and encouraging the implementation of animated GIFS into the browser . . .”
128. The Information Commission Office’s guide to EU cookie law is online at www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx.
129. Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”—originally published in On the Horizon (MCB University Press, vol. 9, no. 5 [October 2001])—can be read along with many of his other writings via his website at www.marcprensky.com/writing.
130. The original Intel memo on “Netiquette guidelines,” dated October 1995, can be read in full online at www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt.
131. For an extremely thorough discussion of Donkey Kong naming debates, see www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/donkeykong.asp.
132. The Technologizer blog published a usefully detailed piece on Mario and his namesake, “The True Face of Mario,” by Benj Edwards on April 25, 2010, online at technologizer.com/2010/04/25/mario.
133. See Chris Kohler’s interview with the creator of Pac-Man, Toru Iwatani, for Wired on May 21, 2010—thirty years after the game’s release—at www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/pac-man-30-years.
134. Bill Wasik offered an in-depth account of his flashmob escapades in the March 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine, online at www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963.
135. Godwin’s original post is reproduced online at w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/godwins.law together with several notable subsequent corollaries and comments.
136. Mike Godwin, “Meme, Counter-Meme,” Wired, October 1994, online at www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_pr.html.
137. Satisfactory sources are difficult to find in this area, with most relying on anecdote and personal recollection—see the discussion at english.stackexchange.com/questions/40013/whats-the-origin-of-beta-to-describe-a-user-testing-phase-of-computer-devel. According to the Jargon File, the terms were first used at IBM only in the 1960s—catb.org/jargon/html/B/beta.html.
138. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners for further details.
139. CNN reported the event on November 26, 2003, under the headline “‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ Computer Labels Unacceptable, Officials Say,” see edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut.
140. One of the earliest citations for “mother board” is a 1956 article in the journal Electronic industries, vol. 15, issue 2, which explains how, “In order to create complete equipment, several . . . wafer-like subassemblies must be connected to a mother board . . .” See also the discussion at english.stackexchange.com/questions/10386/why-motherboard-is-used-to-refer-to-main-board-of-computer which dates the first occurrence of “daughter board” in print to 1965.
141. For a staggeringly detailed history of the pilcrow, see Keith Houston’s three-part history of this punctuation mark on his Shady Characters site, which begins at www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1.
142. The New Hacker’s Dictionary has details on all these wizardly terms, and several others, at www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_38.html#TAG1994 including this gem: “wave a dead chicken /v./ To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended . . .”
143. Microsoft dates its own first software “wizard” to the launch of Publisher 1.0 in 1991; see the Microsoft News article “For 10 Years, Microsoft Publisher Helps Small Business Users ‘Do More Than They Thought They Could’” from October 15, 2001, online at www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2001/oct01/10-15publisher.aspx.
144. The story of the development of the first disk drive is told in fully illustrated detail in a pamphlet by the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center entitled “The IBM350 RAMAC Disk File: Designated an International Historic Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers,” first published on February 27, 1984. Running to fifteen pages, it can be read online in full at www.magneticdiskheritagecenter.org/MDHC/RAMACBrochure.pdf.
145. The White House Easter Egg Roll even has its own official White House webpage at www.whitehousehistoryorg/whha_press/index.php/backgrounders/white-house-easter-egg-roll.
146. Wikipedia’s summary of the first video game Easter egg is probably the best online account of this seminal digital event—see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(Atari_2600).
147. A “museum” of every single Google doodle can be explored online at www.google.com/doodles/finder/2012/All%20doodles.
148. Full details of Excel’s utterly bizarre 1995 Easter egg, complete with pictures, are online at eeggs.com/items/719.html.
149. See Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Allen Lane, 2010), and his discussion, beginning on page 12, of the “locked-in” notion of the computer file as “a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh.”
150. The original “proposal for the Dartmouth Summer research project on artificial intelligence” is dated August 31,1955, with four authors cited: J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, and is online atwww-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html.
151. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, vol. 59, no. 236 [October 1950]: 433–60, online at mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.
152. You can “talk” to ELIZA—and several other chatbots—online at nlp-addiction.com/eliza.
153. Full details of the Loebner Prize are on its website at www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html while a brilliant account of taking part in the competition, and its philosophical implications, can be found in Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive (Viking, 2011)—including the cited story of Shakespeare expert Cynthia Clay, who in November 1991 was deemed a computer by three different judges on the grounds that “no one knows that much about Shakespeare.”
