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2020 is an election year in the US, as I’m sure you know. I got curious about the Iowa Electronic Markets. The IEM is the oldest extant market in the US that allows speculation on American elections. That is because betting on elections is generally illegal in this country. Yet the Commodity Futures Trading Commission made an exception for the University of Iowa, which allowed them to set up the Iowa Political Stock Market back in 1988.
I was curious about how that worked back then. How did people get market prices or place orders? The web? No, I know my web history: it was not created until the 1990s. Brokers? No, the University of Iowa lacked a raucous trading floor; there were no college students shouting orders over the telephone. The answer? I used the Wayback Machine to get the IPSM how-to manual from the oldest copy of the site I found.
The answer is telnet (over a direct dial-up connection). The university built a text interface to their market. If you were a gambler (err, excuse me, a *trader*) looking for that hot political action, you could dial a 319 number (for free if you were in that Iowa area code) and log on. The University of Iowa (mainframe?) computer answered, asked you what terminal you were using (supporting options like the common VT100 or the less common Kimtron... what is a Kimtron?), and gave you a menu with the latest ups and downs.
I didn’t find any images of the IPSM, but their manual from the 1990s had a “screenshot” of the tech earnings market. (You could bet, I mean *trade*, on which tech company would give the best return for the month.) I changed the phone numbers to be the prefix 555, just in case there are bad actors out there.
Iowa Electronic Markets
COMPUTER INDUSTRY RETURNS MARKET CONTRACT LIQUIDATION VALUES
Winner-Takes-All Market |
Highest %Ret. 3/15-4/19 (Closed) |
AAPLd - - 0.001 | $1 if AAPL return is highest
IBMd - - 0.000 | $1 if IBM return is highest
MSFTd - - 0.999 | $1 if MSFT return is highest
SP500d - - 0.001 | $1 if S&P500 return is highest
|
Highest %Ret. 4/19-5/17 (Open) |
AAPLe 0.155 0.190 0.200 | $1 if AAPL return is highest
IBMe 0.295 0.350 0.299 | $1 if IBM return is highest
MSFTe 0.360 0.380 0.360 | $1 if MSFT return is highest
SP500e 0.101 0.170 0.170 | $1 if S&P500 return is highest
------------- Login Menu --------------+--------------------------------------
L - Login to Exchange | New User? Try the Practice Market.
M - Market Selection | Press L, then follow instructions.
I - Market Information |
D - Display Options | For more information contact:
| Phone: (319) 555-0881
| FAX: (319) 555-1956
+Q - Quit Trader Program | EMail: iem@uiowa.edu
+ - Hilight Contract Use a letter to select a menu item. ? Help
Nifty! I kept googling for more info about the old IPSM. I ran across a plain text FAQ document on a Canadian website. The Victoria Freenet hosts several FAQ documents, sourced from Usenet in the 1990s. The FAQ “Resources for Economists on the Internet” talks briefly about the IPSM, not in too much detail.
Now I was interested in the FAQ itself. It is from 1993, when the web existed, and even non-NeXT computers were surfing the web with the latest beta of Mosaic. Yet the World Wide Web is not mentioned at all in this FAQ. That interested me: what, indeed, did the Internet hold for economists before the web?
It seems the Internet held data for economists, served mostly through Gopher.
I give directions for gopher in what I call direct and indirect methods. Some gopher client software allows you to “point” at a gopher site (the direct method), while other software does not, so you have to navigate through gopherspace (the indirect method).
You could get spreadsheets.
Data comes in several formats. Some comes in DOS self extracting files, some in .PRN (so it can be used in spreadsheets or software that can import spreadsheet data), and some in a specialized format.
You could get scholarly papers.
All are Unix compressed PostScript files.
You could get a lot of data from the US government, all you had to do was...
While the records are not available over the Internet (at least not yet), detailed information about them, including a listing of “data files” and ordering information for the data files (generally available only on 9-track tape reels or 3480 tape cartridges) are available.
Unfortunately, the tapes are relatively expensive at either $80.75 or $90.00 (depending upon the medium) with additional tapes at $24.50.
What!? The ’90s were a long time ago, but they weren’t primitive. Reels of tape... that’s the sort of technology that was old when my father was learning about computers. You mean to tell me that Lex is flying around a 3D file system in _Jurassic Park_ in 1993 but at the same time the government is going to sell you data on reel-to-reel from the ’60s mainframe in the Batcave? (And each reel is almost a hundred bucks a pop!)
Irix File System Navigator on Wikipedia
Those were wild times. I dug into that document and enjoyed it. Carl Malamud (“Yes we scan!”) shows up. The new portmanteau of “netiquette” is defined. The author mentions the fact that he purchases books over the Internet from books.com (beating Amazon to the punch by 3 years).
I converted the FAQ to Gemini format and posted it here. Take a look for yourself. Maybe you think it is dull, but it is nonetheless a peek into a wholly different Internet from the one we know today.
I bookmarked that page and kept digging. Searching for books.com led me to find the book _Your Internet Consultant_ by K. Savetz. This is a 1994 book explaining how to get online and what to do on the Internet. Thankfully the book lives to this day because Kay Savetz took the text and put it online. The book has a totally old-web, unstyled, (nearly) text only site.
This site contains full text of my book, Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online. This book was released by Sams Publishing in 1994 and is now out of print. Since it has not been updated since 1994, some parts of it are obsolete (for instance, it barely mentions the Web.) Other parts have held true. I've put the book on the Web in its entirety, where it could possibly help some people, or just languish as an obsolete relic of an earlier Internet.
(WWW) Your Internet Consultant, full text online for free by the author
This book was a lot of fun. The conversational tone is a good technique since the book is styled as a FAQ between a novice and the titular consultant.
Can I send electronic mail advertisements to everyone on the Internet?
Answered by Michael Strangelove (mstrange@fonorola.net)
I always find it somewhat disturbing that there are companies that would want to do this. Fortunately for the Internet, it is not possible to send an “E-ad” to every person on the Internet.
There were some surprising facts in there too. For example, for several years, the main backbone of the Internet that carried the ISPs’ traffic was run by the National Science Foundation. This NSFnet had Acceptable Use Policies that did not allow commerce. People used the Internet for non-research activities anyway; it was against the rules but begrudgingly tolerated until companies took over the backbone.
Your Internet Consultant introduced me to the Cleveland Freenet. I mentioned the Victoria Freenet earlier, but I didn’t know what it was. I had assumed it was like NetZero or those other gratuit ISPs that let you browse the web for free as long as you let their software shove ads at you. The book’s section about the first Freenet, in Cleveland, explained what these networks did. Unlike an ISP, these organizations did not connect you directly to the Internet. You got an e-mail account and you got the resources that your particular group put on this server. They might include message boards, community calendars, library card catalogs, and a directory for city services (like 411, kinda).
Take a look at its welcome screen:
BSDI BSD/386 1.0 (kanga) (ttys8)
/\
WELCOME TO THE... _| |_
_|__ __|_
__ | |
_| |_ | | | |
| | /\ | | | |
| | | | | | | |___
| | | | | | | | |
| |_|_ | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
_| | |_|_ | | |_
| | |_| | |
| |
| CLEVELAND FREE-NET |
| COMMUNITY COMPUTER SYSTEM |
|____________________________________|
brought to you by
Case Western Reserve University
Community Telecomputing Laboratory
Are you:
1. A registered user
2. A visitor
Please enter 1 or 2:
Never having used a dial-up BBS, I can’t say for sure, but I believe a Freenet was like a powerful, slightly more modern BBS. If the Internet is the ocean, a Freenet is a tide pool.
The flagship feature was the e-mail account. If there’s one thing I learned from these pre-web documents, it’s that e-mail WAS the Internet (until the early ’90s). You could email people, sure. In those days you could also use e-mail as a conduit to read news, discuss topics on message boards, and even transfer (small) files. All this was available for free: no monthly charge like an ISP and no telephone charges since it was a local call.
As the Internet grew, it shed its store-and-forward nature and an e-mail account became insufficient as someone’s sole Internet access. Freenets could not afford to directly connect to the Internet backbone and morph into traditional ISPs. So they died out. Yet it’s heartening to see community institutions (usually universities or public libraries) combined their local knowledge with technology to bring the “information superhighway” to their community for free. I love that spirit and I hope we can keep it alive.
27 August 2020 by Sardonyx
Updated 27 August 2020
File under: history
File under: technology
File under: small internet
File under: see reading room
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