Give or take a few days, it was fifteen years ago that I hit send on the first official issue of NTK. I was hiding out at a start-up called Virgin Internet, trying to work out how to bring Usenet to the masses, or something. I added people to the mailing list by hand, but stuck “-l” at the end of the subscribe email address to make it sound like it was a proper listserv. I still hear people say “listserv”, occasionally, and it sounds like they’re saying “thee” or “gadzooks” or something.
People usually say at this point that it doesn’t seem like maxint years ago, but, to be honest, it does. It feels exactly fifteen years ago. What’s weird for me is that the three years before NTK came out feels even longer. 1994-1997 involved me going from being on the dole, to appearing in a one man show in the west end, doing TV, working at Wired, joining a startup. That, and the Internet went from being this funny little squeaky gopher thing to having internet addresses on adverts. On adverts! Which, incidentally, we all smugly knew would go away soon, because advertising was lying and the Internet was going to make lying impossible. Or something.
. What I wanted to tell you was that last year after I explaining someone how we were all too collectively lazy to do something to celebrate NTK’s 15th anniversary, that someone came up with a brilliant Minimal Viable Celebration. So, for the next ten years or so, if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll get a weekly copy of the NTK that came out fifteen years ago, totally unchanged. It’s like that thing where you get a copy of the Times’ front page for your birthday, except every week is your birthday! Or our birthday. Or something. The name, Anno NTK, comes from Simon Wistow. If it was your idea to do this, tell me!
As I say, it’s literally the least we could do. I actually suspect (and hope) that this will become a bit of a trend in itself. Just as early retrospective sites like the Pepys Diary are drawing to a close, I think there’s this rich unmined pile of early blog-o-mobilia, waiting to have a nice interface stuck on it. It would be great, for instance, to watch in real time all the bloggers who supported the Iraq war go through their transformations and justifications day by day, or watch stuff like DrKoop and the Industry Standard rise and fall once again. There are lots of weird echoes in the air right now. I really hope other people won’t be as lazy as us, and put a nice frontend on the past.
And meanwhile, thirty years ago, Usenet itself was beginning to outgrow the ability for a human mind to comprehend. Thank goodness the future was so close…
May 25th, 2012 at 11:21 am
I still miss my Friday afternoon NTK email delivery. It marked that moment in the afternoon where you could stop working without feeling guilty and the weekend started. Still regret throwing away my Elite/NTK tshirt…
May 25th, 2012 at 11:41 am
Still have my “Viral marketing doesn’t work …tell everyone you know” shirt.
People still don’t get it. :-)
Thank you!
May 25th, 2012 at 12:49 pm
What a lovely idea!
Neil, I still have my NTK Elite shirt. How much regret are we talking? *rubs hands together*
In line with the Pepys Diary thing, is there a plan to set up an Expanded Universe Wiki to allow us to track all the various characters and entities?
My own blog doesn’t go back far enough to make a similar effort worthwhile. Also, all the other reasons.
Cheers!
May 25th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Still wear my BORN TO RUN L shirt. No-one gets that one either.
May 25th, 2012 at 3:30 pm
I was doing A-levels and didn’t understand half the references in NTK. But thanks for talking to me as if I did.
May 25th, 2012 at 3:37 pm
What a great idea.
It’s amazing how far things have moved in those 15 years… this will be a warm reminder of my misspent youth.
Thanks Danny ;)
May 25th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
This should be fun, thanks.
Sean
May 25th, 2012 at 6:02 pm
[…] Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » NTK, Fifteen Years On – dob on the re-emergence of NTK, 15 years later. Reading today's issue, it's amazing how things are still the same. […]
May 25th, 2012 at 7:05 pm
Matt, yes there is! I think me and Yoz and Simon have to go drinking a bit more before it’s finished, but we do have plans…
Carl, our standard reply to that was always that *we* didn’t understand half of NTK. We had the excuse that there was 3 of us writing it, but still. It was always intensely fun to write up to an imaginary audience, instead of down to one.
May 26th, 2012 at 8:12 am
*My* NTK shirt is “I spend all day bitching about you on IRC channels you can’t see.” Hand-mailed by Dave.
May 26th, 2012 at 8:44 am
Nice! As a chronic late-joiner, I subscribed to NTK just as it ended. Thanks to BoingBoing (where my identity is cleverly concealed by the nearly-uncrackable “rot13” cypher), I find I can now catch up on everything I heard you or Yoz talking about that left me with a vaguely puzzled look on my face. More of one than usual, I mean.
May 26th, 2012 at 8:46 am
(…thanks to BB for leading me here, that is)
May 26th, 2012 at 11:53 am
[…] Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » NTK, Fifteen Years On – NTK on repeat. Brilliant and in keeping with, well, something. […]
May 26th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
brilliant
idea…
I miss NTK so much ~ more than eve in some ways
No matter how rough the week had been, NTK on a friday afternoon left me on the floor int fits of laughter and light..
ntk made sense and nonsense of everything and nothing
Thank You Thank Thank you!
May 26th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
trying to subscribe… haven’t received the confirmation email after 10 minutes… 8-(
May 26th, 2012 at 2:15 pm
happy to report that the email finally arrived, and i am subscribed… maybe tinyletter spreads out their outgoing emails… if so, they should probably say so. looking forward to my ntk! thx.
May 26th, 2012 at 5:18 pm
[…] NTK, Fifteen Years On […]
May 27th, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Your NTK link is to http://www.ntk.net/1997/05/23 which is a 404.
If that’s an in-joke I’m not cool enough to get it.
May 27th, 2012 at 5:25 pm
@ambrose
– http://www.ntk.net/1997/05/23
+ http://www.ntk.net/1997/05/23/
May 28th, 2012 at 1:23 am
Ambrose – the link needs a trailing slash:
http://www.ntk.net/1997/05/23/
But 15 years? Fuck. Thanks for making me feel old. I remember HTML when it was all fields.
May 28th, 2012 at 3:35 am
Is it that long already? Amazing. I miss NTK too; Fridays aren’t the same without it. And now nobody understands me if I say “FALCO!” or refer to something as “a Widdecombe”.
I recently found my “You must install Japanese text display support to read this t-shirt” NTK t-shirt which I bought at NotCon ’04. Good times.
Thanks for all the links and laughs.
May 28th, 2012 at 11:21 am
Oh, heck. Here comes a walk back through the origin of 50% of my SIG file, back when those were a “thing.”
May 28th, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Hey. I fucked up those 15 years last time. (“Apple? So over. But Veronica…”)
TRY AGAIN? [Y/N]
>N
May 28th, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Thank you for doing this. I’ve missed NTK very much.
May 28th, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Uncanny! I was just on ntk.net last week, trying to dredge up the memories of those simple happy times.
Thanks for feeding my nostalgia.
June 9th, 2012 at 2:45 am
[…] out what this here Internet thingy was actually for. Read more from one of the original writers here or subscribe via the old fashioned “email” here. And in just under a years time, the […]
June 15th, 2012 at 4:05 am
OMG, NTK is back?! **bursts into tears of joy** Don’t you ever leave me again!