dnk@primerd.UUCP (12/02/87)
You can help HITCHER... Or you can turn the page! Over the weekend, while browsing in a Boston-area Macintosh dialin bulletin- board, I noticed in the "new downloadable files" area a program called HITCHER. All available programs in this BBoard have a 1-line description to help users preview what they'll be getting if they download and run the program or document. HITCHER's said that it was "A program trying to journey around the world." "Hmm, interesting," I said. When I downloaded and ran it, it was even MORE interesting, and such a unique concept I wanted to pass it around for your enjoyment -- and your possible assistance. When I ran the application, it came up with a screen that was written both in French and in English. It said: "LE DISCO-STOPPEUR aimerait visiter le monde. Aidez-le s'il vous plait! Ecrivez votre nom, votre ville et votre pays et offrez-le a tout le monde. Ce serait gentil de m'envoyer une carte postale pour me dire ou se trouve THE HITCHER. THE HITCHER would like to visit the world. Please help him! Write your name, your city, and your country, and give him away to everyone you know. It would be nice to send me a postcard to let me know where THE HITCHER is." There followed the author's name and address, which is in France. The next screen showed a map of the world and a list of this program's previous stops, called "The Hitcher's Logbook." Clicking on each line of the list showed a logbook entry with a user's name, date, city name, and country. Each display of a given list-member was accompanied by the corresponding display, on the map of the world, of a little X marking the spot that HITCHER had been at that logbook entry. If you browse through the hitcher's journey, you find that this particular copy traveled through France in one hop, from its birthplace in northern France,to Montpellier near the Riviera, thence to Schenectady NY, thence to San Jose CA, Clifton NJ, Clark NJ, Peachtree City GA, Fairfax VA, Greenbelt MD, whence it materialized next on the Boston-based BBoard where I found it. This second screen shows two "choice buttons:" one labeled BYE (which exits the program) and another "OK, I'll help him!" which brings up a final screen where the "ride-giver" fills in his/her name, place, etc., and places his/her own "X marks the spot" on the world map by "clicking on" the current location. The final action to help the hitcher on his way is either to upload the file to some other BBoard (hopefully as distant as possible in a westward direction), or to send a floppy with the Hitcher on it to a friend in the same westerly direction. I've sent the Hitcher to a Mac-user friend in San Francisco... and I've sent a computer-age "QSL card" to his progenitor in France... Here's where YOU can help... If YOU are a gregarious Mac user on the Coast, or Hawaii or better yet, Australia or Japan, I'd LOVE to send the Hitcher to you... I could do this via floppy or (If you can reach me by mail) via a BinHex version... Any takers? I'll do this for the first couple of pointers, certainly not for all (I don't want to run out of floppies B-) ... If asked convincingly, I might post it in BinHex to COMP.BINARIES.MAC, but that somehow seems like too much of a "boost" for our little friend... This is one of those fascinating new ideas that really stops one in one's tracks. As for me, it was as if my head were a bell, and this idea struck it in a new way, making it vibrate in ways it hadn't, previously... Resonances with Ham Radio's QSL cards... We've heard about "Trojan Horse" programs that according to legend are sometimes passed around via BBoards, which sometimes do mischief to the pc's they land in... We've also read of the notion of "self-replicating" programs which, according to fiction, travel around from system to compatible system by dialing out until they find a suitable "host," and upon finding one, transmit themselves and repeat the process... The Hitcher is a curious blend of both ideas, with a winning ingenuousness that I find charming. It "happily" throws itself on the mercy of its readers/users, trusting that kind souls will extend a helping hand. It's NOT a classical "chain letter" in that it "has an objective" (to return to its starting point) and in that there's no financial or superstitious purpose in its journey. Purely a journey of the mind... The Hitcher is a new idea that passes from user to user like the "memes" that Douglas Hofstadter characterizes as the intellectual equivalents of "genes." According to Hofstadter, a "meme" is a successful concept which like all such ideas, propagates by "infecting" receptive minds -- which adopt, expand on, and transmit it to others. Like the concept of "meme" itself, being passed on here. The Hitcher will make it around the world on a "human wave" of adoptions of its concept, on wings of modem and ferrous oxide. How I'd love to watch the author as he plots, via Cartes Postales, The Hitcher's modern-day Odyssey... I wonder whether I should also make a journey to the ocean, and drop into a bottle a report on The Hitcher's arrival in Boston, trusting that it finds a France-bound eddy of the Gulf Stream... resonances... Here's an amusing sidelight on The Hitcher's local wanderings. I downloaded "him" from a Boston BBoard last Saturday. Since I'd already sent a copy Westward, I didn't bring The Hitcher into work on disk today. It occurred to me this afternoon that my company's VP of software development, who also occasionally reads Mac BBoards, would probably enjoy a look at The Hitcher. So I dialed another of the local BBoards, this one in Somerville, where I found The Hitcher. I downloaded him and gave the copy to my VP on a floppy. Later today, when I decided that the story of The Hitcher was "too nifty not to share" on Prime's internal BBoard, I fired up TODAY'S copy of The Hitcher so I could write down his words and document his journeys. Imagine my surprise to find that the new copy I'd given my VP on floppy had ALREADY been "autographed" and uploaded to that BBoard -- by my VP, himself! Whoops! <B^} Guess he'd already been infected with THAT particular meme... Again, this is the kind of humorous contretemps that could ONLY have happened based on a new set of connections... As my kids often say, "Quelle Concept!!" B-)> Dan Kalikow Prime Computer, Inc. dnk@enx.prime.com