Simon
simon.poole.ch
Simon
@simon.poole.ch
Father, jack of many trades, open data cynic. Somewhat involved with OpenStreetMap

Allergic to monopolies and have a knack of making myself unpopular with them.

More active on mastodon as @[email protected]
oneway=no and oneway=false are not actually oneway tags that need to be reversed, but oneway=1, oneway=yes and oneway=-1 are.

And when you manually reverse we don't actually change oneway tags but do reverse other direction dependent ones.

#OpenStreetMap
November 20, 2025 at 4:36 PM
and many other things from slightly amusing to depressing (for example a letter to the Department of the Interior in Causa SWITCH) .

Framemaker because IIRC that was what I had bought for my Spacstation 1+ which was our office machine in the beginning.

#Internet #Nostalgia
November 20, 2025 at 1:10 PM
... a talk by me on the Internet at Hoffman-Roche in 91, the contracts for the 1st Internet connections of the UNICC and the @ifrc.org , yes we were brave enough to offer a SLA for the leased line connections, ...
November 20, 2025 at 1:10 PM
There's a poetic justice angle to this that I might expand on later.

#Internet #Nostaliga
November 2, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Domain names are, as the name says, names and not addresses and using the same logic the BAKOM could have just as well started regulating company names.

This was later, a lot later, patched up by changing the FMG (the Swiss telecom law) and creating a specific ordinance for domain names.
...
November 2, 2025 at 11:51 AM
But instead of getting a multitude of interoperable operating system we ended up with a duopoly.

#EUnet #Nostalgia
October 26, 2025 at 9:58 AM
...
myself, ch.network, July 31st 1992

I suppose this still kind of holds true for ISPs which was the topic of the discussion at the time.

#Internet #EUnet #Nostalgia
October 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
In the mean time I'm fairly sure that the first demo was not in 89 but either late 90 or 91. There are simply conflicting accounts and as I said, this was still a non-event at the time.
October 20, 2025 at 12:04 PM
...

So the UUCP maps might be the only way to at least roughly date it.

#EUnet #UUCP #Nostalgia
October 20, 2025 at 9:08 AM
What I'm specifically trying to pinpoint is when we started registering CH domains for UUCP sites, it doesn't seem this was announced anywhere that has survived the not quite 4 decades and maybe we just sent a mail at the time.

...
October 20, 2025 at 9:08 AM
1989-1990 I managed them at SWITCH on chx400, that's not a secret either. But did we stop distributing them during that period, or did something else happen?

I don't have any mail archives from that period (for obvious reasons), but maybe somebody can remember.
...
October 20, 2025 at 9:08 AM
... we didn't actually provide local Internet access in Geneva till 1993 (we did have mail and news customers there though).

* I can't verify this story one way or the other, while the history of the WWW is often told as a straight line going from A to B, it was anything but that.
October 18, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Just for those wondering: while we were connecting to the shared and #EUnet co-financed Internet access in Geneva at CERN at this time, and this was the actual first Internet presence in Switzerland operating since 1989, supposedly used by @timbl.bsky.social to demo the WWW in the same year*, ...
October 18, 2025 at 4:05 PM