This table shows the number of Usenet posts that mention alertbox.
Alertbox on Usenet
The first mention of Alertbox on Usenet was on 21 Aug 1995, in the BayCHI announcement for the Anti-Mac Interface
"Jakob was previously with
Bellcore, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center. His monthly column is at
http://www.sun.com/current/columns/alertbox."
more...
Jakob mentioned Alertbox on 4 Dec 1995
"An
initial set of guidelines for appropriate use of dynamic media on the web
are available at: http://www.sun.com/951201/columns/alertbox"
more...
Some interesting comments on the BayCHI meeting
"During the question session a fellow in the front described
a similarity of Gentner's approach to that which was used for the earliest Mac efforts. Norman introduced the fellow to the
audience as Jeff Raskin (the leader of the earliest Mac designs before a certain Steve took over)."
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Jakob Nielsen on Usenet
The first reference I can find about Jakob is in a post to the net.sf-lovers group on 10 Sep 1985 where he is thanked for his participation in a vote for the best sci-fi books. I wonder what he voted for?
"Jakob
Nielsen <packard!csnet-relay.arpa!nielsen.yktvmv%ibm-sj.csnet>"
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This is the first post I can find from Jakob, and it may be the most embarrassing !
"I
have actually for some time used the term "AIQ" (Artificial
Intelligence Quotient) as a shorthand when discussing computers (e.g.
"this system has an incredibly low AIQ")."
12 Nov 1985
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Jakob was a programmer, even if it was just Hypercard.
"What is a good way to test if the contents of a field is an integer ?"
5 Jan 1988 Hyper Hacker
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Jakob sells his first report in a floppy disk barter scheme.
"My report on the recent HyperTEXT workshop is now available
in a hypertext version in the form of a 400 K HyperCard stack. To read it, you will need a Macintosh and APple's HyperCard program.
To get a copy of this electronic document please send two double sided Macintosh diskettes to the following address. One diskette
will be returned to you with the hypertext report and the other will be kept to cover postage and hanling."
29 Feb 1988
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"Has anyone extracted the useful information from the gizmos and
gadgets and produced a convenient text version of this document? I don't see the sense in mailing floppies around the world, and
having to dig up a Mac and run a proprietary program, to read a simple report on a topic of interest."
11 Apr 1988 John Gilmore
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First mention of Bill Gates.
"Bill Gates (CEO of MicroSoft) was in Copenhagen yesterday and gave
a talk on his views of the future in the IBM PC sector. He promoted graphical user interfaces and windows very heavily and tried to
get everybody to jump on that bandwagon."
7 Jun 1988
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A bit of a pedant
"I am fairly sure that this timeline appeared in one of the aniversary
issues of the Communications of the ACM and not in the Annals of the History of Computing."
4 Oct 1990
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Analytical viewing habits.
"When I lived in Denmark, my algorithm for whether it was worth
taping a film from TV was whether it had at least two stars in Halliwel's film guide (scale of 0-4 stars). Now I don't even tape
all the three-star films."
26 Oct 1990
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The Danification of Disney.
"Also note that Mickey Mouse was called Mikkel Mus
(mus=mouse) for some time in Denmark."
27 Nov 1990
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Questioning of Jakob's Mac centric view..
"Program "bombimg" is
a term that must go back even farther than that."
28 Nov 1990 Jack Berkery
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Jakob shows his hard core computing credentials.
"[note 1]: "Regnecentralen" was an early Danish computer company which
built the DASK and Gier computers back in the 1950s and 1960s (I learnt to program on a Gier - great machine!)."
30 Nov 1990
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and his programming laurels
"Back in 1974 (when I was in high school) I used a version of BASIC on a
minicomputer (the Nova or Novo - or some such name). I seem to recall that BASIC was quite popular for educational use then and was
implemented on several minis and mainframes. I did most of my programming in
Algol, however."
2 Jan 1991
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Merry Christimas.
"The word "julekage" would certainly be Danish (though I would normally spell it
in one word), meaning "Christmas cake"
2 Jan 1991
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Stamping on the revisionist history of computing
"No, the mouse was invented in 1964 by Doug Engelbart at SRI."
24 Jan 1991
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I've got a bigger one than you.
"I must say that I found the book a little bit too un-mathematical for my taste
(Ph.D. in computer science), but that is probably necessary for the mass market."
17 Jan 1991
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Long live the Queen
"The AP newswire had a story on the visit which mostly stated that the Queen
looked striking and that Bush had praised Denmark's effort in the Gulf"
21 Feb 1991
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I remember when we had to use paper tape !
"Some additional info on the RC2000 is given (in Danish) by Kurt Andersen on pp.
55-56 in the facinating book on Danish computer history "Niels Ivar Bech - en epoke i edb-udviklingen i Danmark""
12 Mar 1991
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A taste of the old country.
mmmmm Iversen rugbroed
"It tastes good and approximately like the better bread that is sold in
Denmark under the same circumstances. But of course it still cannot match truely fresh bread."
10 Apr 1991
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Jake Nelson
"Latest misspelling was from the local cable TV company though one would have
imagined that people in the TV industry were attuned to the name Nielsen (the name of the company that collects the ratings statistics)."
23 May 1991
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and don't even start him on grammar.
"Please note that the official capitalization of the Technical University of
Denmark has been changed to Danmarks Tekniske H/ojskole (that is, all three words starting with upper
case)."
16 Oct 1991
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Everyone needs a little help sometimes
"but there must be some way the X
server (MacX) tells the X client (the program running on the mainframe) that it has a color screen and can accept color windows. Please help."
17 Oct 1991
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"I would like to thank Spencer W. Thomas and David C. Doherty for providing the
following answer:"
17 Oct 1991
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Needs a bit more work on the film criticism.
"The
worst (given its prominence) was probably the sign saying "Smithsonian Institute" when in fact it is called the "Smithsonian Institution"."
21 Jan 1993
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