ber@sunet.se has died, aged 57. Not that I ever met him, but I did get a couple of his infamous emails that only consisted of "Ok". I always thought he was much younger than that.
Not that I know of. It's of little interest outside Sweden, anyway. ber was the guy who got saddled with the job of handling domain registrations for .se back in 1988 or so, and kept doing it single-handedly until the summer of 1997. Which kind of explains the exceptional brevity of his replies when you mailed and wanted something changed... Everybody who had anything much to do with the Internet in Sweden for most of a decade dealt with him at some point or another, and yet I never heard anybody say anything nasty about him.
Everything got much, much uglier once big money started getting into it. It's strange and sad to contemplate that the sendmail "debug" command was once actually a good idea.
The Internet was voluntary for a long time, which was okay. Some chunks of it moved into more formal settings bit by bit, which was okay. Some bits, unfortunately, got ripped away from the volunteers almost at gunpoint; it went from "we don't care what you geeks are doing" to "hand it over now or we sue" without going through the intervening "we can do that now, thanks," or even "we'd like to control that, if you don't mind."
Wasn't .au untimely rip't recently? Or am I misremembering?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 03:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 03:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 06:01 pm (UTC)Wasn't .au untimely rip't recently? Or am I misremembering?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-08 07:38 am (UTC)He was a gentle guy the few times I met him. Its a sad thing that he has gone away.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 03:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 06:45 pm (UTC)