Posted on 02/06/2011 10:46:48 AM PST by Justaham
An NBC worker who posted old footage from the "Today" show of the hosts wondering, "What is the Internet anyway?" has been fired, the network confirmed, saying the person had a history of distributing material without permission.
The footage, in which Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas try to figure out the Internet and e-mail addresses, made the rounds via said Internet last week, posted and re-posted to Facebook pages and sent via e-mail.
Filmed in 1994, the clip features Gumbel demanding, with a befuddled expression: "What is the Internet anyway?" and Couric stumbling to define it as: "that massive computer network, the one that's becoming really big now."
In a statement, NBC confirmed it fired the employee responsible for first distributing the footage.
"The individual in question violated the company's standards of conduct by repeatedly copying and distributing a variety of materials without permission," the statement said. It was reported on media-watching websites including All Things Digital and PaidContent.
In the clip, Gumbel also complains about e-mail addresses, particularly "that little mark with the 'a' and the ring around it."
As the clip gained attention, "Today" itself featured the footage and current host Matt Lauer laughingly noted: "We all felt that way at the time. It was a mystery to all of us."
(Excerpt) Read more at aolnews.com ...
I guess videotape hadn’t happened on Today yet. The film/taping terminology misues drives me crazy.
He probably wanted to kill this guy too.
One thoroughly vetted visitor per month is allowed into the laboratory, under close supervision, to test their portable secondary standards against it, and take those standards back to their home country for further use in calibrating instruments there.
Heh heh heh ... don’t you have one of those?
“...saying the person had a history of distributing material without permission.”
TRANSLATION: The guy often put actual facts in front of the public...you know, the stuff that embarrasses leftists!!
. . .”that massive computer network, the one that’s becoming really big now” showed Katie being treated like cow manure in Cairo.
This really ticks me off. That clip was hilarious, and is actually an interesting piece of history. I can’t believe they fired a guy over that. Don’t they do funny little clips and stuff like that on the Today show anyway?
Nah, no debate. He never said it. Gates and Microsoft said a lot of silly things over the years, but not that one. In fact Gates railed against IBM for limiting the available RAM to only 640KB. He wanted the entire 1MB native address space of the 8086 available.
I'm no fan of Gates, but this particular criticism is a canard.
As to whether anyone in IBM -did- say it in those or similar words, I don't recall. It could be something overheard in a meeting, or even a complete fabrication.
As I recall, it was an Intel mucky muck who made the statement in a debate discussing the relative merits of the architecture of the Intel chips compared to the larger addressable space in the 68000 family being adopted by the Mac, Amiga, and Atari.
Ah, that would make sense.
Think how different the computing landscape would be, if only Motorola had had the 68000 family -- including the necessary peripheral chips -- ready to go when IBM was designing the IBM-PC. It's widely believed that IBM had wanted to go with the 68K, because they knew the value of large address space, but the 8-bit version (68008) wasn't ready yet, and only Intel had a complete set of peripheral chips ready to roll.
*sigh*
lol everyone knows that @ is the “snail” key!
It used to mean “each”, and was used on order forms and ledgers, now we call it “at” but I know it’s really the sign of the snail.
And then there is the octothorpe.
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