Today my dad sent me an interesting email.
It was a link to slashdot, a uber nerdy website.
The story is about William Gibson, a prescient science fiction writer of the dreaded American/Canadian hybrid. I have only read a little of the man's work. But he envisioned much of the internet has become, and how computers, cyberworlds, etc...have shaped humans.
I've yet to read the AGRIPPA Files poem, I've only slept about 5 hours the last three days, but I look forward to it after finals are over, as well as more good future-fashioned sci-fi reading over the winter holidays. Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" hear I come.
But I'll post it here as well:
Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."
Here is the link to UC Santa Barbara's AGRIPPA recent past archeology of sorts.
