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Posts like this remind me what an amazing phenomenon Internet is. 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. I hope we get to protect an

Posts like this remind me what an amazing phenomenon Internet is. 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. I hope we get to protect and keep Internet for generations to come.

p-e-w 4y ago
Not only would it have been left unanswered, it would have been almost impossible to get an answer even with enormous resources. You could have paid a detective agency millions of dollars and the chance that one of them would stumble upon an obscure memory test containing the numbers would have been slim to none, even with tens of thousands of man-hours dedicated to the task.
- tasuki 4y ago
  Makes me wonder how many man-hours were spent on this now. Surely either it was luck that a person with this knowledge read the question, or an extremely large number of people read the question?
  - Sander_Marechal 4y ago
    Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - Eric S. Raymond
  - GTP 4y ago
    Or maybe the one who answered just tried googling for an increasing sequence of those numbers. You can try by yourself to see if it works.
  - gibolt 4y ago
    Probably someone with some good search engine skills. Considering most of the numbers are exact matches, searching for those exact numbers should result in a hit if it has been crawled
  - kataklasm 4y ago
    You assume that question could only have been with innate knowledge of the answer. But just by querying a search engine with two of the numbers I was able to get the same link: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 With DuckDuckGo it is even the only search result for the same two numbers and I didn't even have to quote them: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530
    - wjholden 4y ago
      Tangentially related, I've had some success Googling constants before. For example, I once got interested in the constants in the Harris-Benedict function for estimating basal metabolic rates. By searching for these constants, I quickly found the original text and some other interesting related material. This approach generalizes to strings as well. In my field of computer networking, you're an easy search away from finding out what 0x0800 means with very little context. Searches can also work for numbers that don't look familiar. For example, you'd immediate recognize the first few digits of π, but you might not so easily recognize π²≈9.86960440109.
- rozab 4y ago
  I suppose the memory test would likely be in a book or pamphlet in the house
- emeril 4y ago
  maybe so, but it's unlikely, in the past, she would have been using an obscure memory test on the internet but instead would have been using something available right in the house
bnegreve 4y ago
I don't know .. is it that more of these questions get answered, or that when one of these questions gets an answer, we all learn about it?
- randomdata 4y ago
  If more questions are answered, is it because of the internet or is there some other factor like people having more time to answer questions? It's not like the internet wasn't alive and well 20 years ago. Hell, Stack Exchange is little more than Usenet, and that was in use over 40 years ago.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of "more people connected together who can answer, an ability to quickly find relevant pervious answers, coupled with some amount of social capital accrual that makes taking the time to answer worthwhile". Those things make me think 'internet' is at least a big part of the answer.
  - wintorez 4y ago
    Sorry, 20 years was an arbitrary number. What I meant was before the internet. :D
- weinzierl 4y ago
  As someone old enough to have had a glimpse of the time before the internet I'd say definitely the former. The fact that almost everyone can find the answer to almost anything in almost no time is a historic break that in my opinion is hardly to underestimate. Of course it didn't solve all our problems and brought a couple of new ones with it.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Yet its so weird that with all that information at our disposal that so few people bother to look things up.
rendall 4y ago
> 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. Maybe, but she also would not have had access herself to the internet, and so a series of numbers like this would have been related to a book in the house or local library or at worst a TV show that others would have seen, and therefore much easier to find.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Maybe you grew up after the age of the newspaper and the magazine, but this sort of ephemeral content was quite common in disposable media.
  - rendall 4y ago
    Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to "search the internet"), the possibilities were fewer too. "What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room?" Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have been "almost impossible". On the contrary, it might have been as easy as calling a research librarian with a time range and the relatively small list of possible resources she would have had access to, e.g. "Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, Reader's Digest, Stephen King's The Stand, W Magazine and The Springfield Local Tattler"
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.
madaxe_again 4y ago
Not only that, but it would have been 20 minutes of a programme on the history channel with speculation about demons, aliens, the sensitivity of cats to witchcraft, and messages from the beyond.
- mypalmike 4y ago
  Except that back then, the History Channel was a somewhat stuffy educational channel devoted largely to World War II documentaries.
altun 4y ago
Life was, in a way, colored by the mystery involved. With every innovation that comes, there are also things that it eliminates.
- mkraft 4y ago
  That’s poetic. Maybe I’ll understand it eventually.

p-e-w 4y ago

Not only would it have been left unanswered, it would have been almost impossible to get an answer even with enormous resources. You could have paid a detective agency millions of dollars and the chance that one of them would stumble upon an obscure memory test containing the numbers would have been slim to none, even with tens of thousands of man-hours dedicated to the task.

tasuki 4y ago
Makes me wonder how many man-hours were spent on this now. Surely either it was luck that a person with this knowledge read the question, or an extremely large number of people read the question?
- Sander_Marechal 4y ago
  Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - Eric S. Raymond
- GTP 4y ago
  Or maybe the one who answered just tried googling for an increasing sequence of those numbers. You can try by yourself to see if it works.
- gibolt 4y ago
  Probably someone with some good search engine skills. Considering most of the numbers are exact matches, searching for those exact numbers should result in a hit if it has been crawled
- kataklasm 4y ago
  You assume that question could only have been with innate knowledge of the answer. But just by querying a search engine with two of the numbers I was able to get the same link: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22627418%22+%2219223530%22 With DuckDuckGo it is even the only search result for the same two numbers and I didn't even have to quote them: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=627418+19223530
  - wjholden 4y ago
    Tangentially related, I've had some success Googling constants before. For example, I once got interested in the constants in the Harris-Benedict function for estimating basal metabolic rates. By searching for these constants, I quickly found the original text and some other interesting related material. This approach generalizes to strings as well. In my field of computer networking, you're an easy search away from finding out what 0x0800 means with very little context. Searches can also work for numbers that don't look familiar. For example, you'd immediate recognize the first few digits of π, but you might not so easily recognize π²≈9.86960440109.
rozab 4y ago
I suppose the memory test would likely be in a book or pamphlet in the house
emeril 4y ago
maybe so, but it's unlikely, in the past, she would have been using an obscure memory test on the internet but instead would have been using something available right in the house

bnegreve 4y ago

I don't know .. is it that more of these questions get answered, or that when one of these questions gets an answer, we all learn about it?

randomdata 4y ago
If more questions are answered, is it because of the internet or is there some other factor like people having more time to answer questions? It's not like the internet wasn't alive and well 20 years ago. Hell, Stack Exchange is little more than Usenet, and that was in use over 40 years ago.
- kjs3 4y ago
  There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of "more people connected together who can answer, an ability to quickly find relevant pervious answers, coupled with some amount of social capital accrual that makes taking the time to answer worthwhile". Those things make me think 'internet' is at least a big part of the answer.
- wintorez 4y ago
  Sorry, 20 years was an arbitrary number. What I meant was before the internet. :D
weinzierl 4y ago
As someone old enough to have had a glimpse of the time before the internet I'd say definitely the former. The fact that almost everyone can find the answer to almost anything in almost no time is a historic break that in my opinion is hardly to underestimate. Of course it didn't solve all our problems and brought a couple of new ones with it.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Yet its so weird that with all that information at our disposal that so few people bother to look things up.

rendall 4y ago

> 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. Maybe, but she also would not have had access herself to the internet, and so a series of numbers like this would have been related to a book in the house or local library or at worst a TV show that others would have seen, and therefore much easier to find.

wpietri 4y ago
Maybe you grew up after the age of the newspaper and the magazine, but this sort of ephemeral content was quite common in disposable media.
- rendall 4y ago
  Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to "search the internet"), the possibilities were fewer too. "What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room?" Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have been "almost impossible". On the contrary, it might have been as easy as calling a research librarian with a time range and the relatively small list of possible resources she would have had access to, e.g. "Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, Reader's Digest, Stephen King's The Stand, W Magazine and The Springfield Local Tattler"
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.

madaxe_again 4y ago

Not only that, but it would have been 20 minutes of a programme on the history channel with speculation about demons, aliens, the sensitivity of cats to witchcraft, and messages from the beyond.

mypalmike 4y ago
Except that back then, the History Channel was a somewhat stuffy educational channel devoted largely to World War II documentaries.

altun 4y ago

Life was, in a way, colored by the mystery involved. With every innovation that comes, there are also things that it eliminates.

mkraft 4y ago
That’s poetic. Maybe I’ll understand it eventually.