VoIP
Paul Graham quoted on Daring Fireball in a wonderfully named article Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers – the title being very close to home.
“In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren’t sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet, which was still then a quasi-government entity. What he was doing is now called VoIP, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business.”
I wonder if Neal Stephenson has considered returning to Apple hardware since his In the beginning was the Command Line and it’s hymn to emacs. We are all getting old. The youngsters click mice….