Autodidactics and The Internet

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My Olympus OM2SP bought in 1986 & Pentax SP500, a recent-ish eBay buy.

    You can take the Internet in so many ways. Too most people it amounts to little more than Social Media, games, shopping and watching stuff/listening to music - a bit like a superset of traditional media.
    For very early adopters such as myself - pre-web-browser days - it was an enigmatic offshoot of military and then academic enterprise. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was a US Dept of defense project. Along with the development of packet-switched data and the TCP/IP protocol ((Google 'em ;-) - irony intended - note programmers' balanced brackets here...) the aim was for a nuclear-hardened data comms network based on multiple redundancy. Essentially, if one node of the network is knocked out, the thing as a whole doesn't fall over.
    Then came the academic use of the network (I'm précis-ing like mad here, because I want to get to the point,) using the then very small scale system for the secure sharing of academic papers and research materials, and email and so on.
    By the time I got involved with it in the early '90s, the World Wide Web had been invented and overlaid on the existing network. The very first text-only web-browsers appeared soon after, quickly followed by the thing that made it usable in a real-world sense: search. Without search you needed to know the exact URL of the page or document you were looking for - not particularly useful if you didn't already belong to 'the club'. Anyway, fast forward to the turn of the century and capitalism has already taken over the playground - in less than ten short years - from an arcane communications medium used by a relatively small number of largely geeky people to Amazon, eBay & Google.
    Anyhow, whatever the evils of big data and multi-corporate capitalist behemoths like the above, there is an upside to it all: autodidacticism for the masses! No longer merely the preserve of landed Gentlemen sporting dubious Oxbridge MA's and pedigrees as long as a Crufts dynastic line, we can all learn something on the Interweb. Everyone has something to share and something to learn - it's almost Socialist. There - I've said the S word and I wasn't struck down from above for my pains.
    The point I'm making is that I've just repaired my aged and beloved Olympus OM2SP film camera, which I thought was lost to active duty: thanks to a post I found by a simple search of the Web I took the advice of a guy who had been there and followed his instructions - et voilá - a working camera! And that's the second old camera I've fixed using the same process in as many weeks - I picked up an old Pentax SP500 from eBay a couple of years back for no money, but the mirror wouldn't drop after the shutter had released. I consigned it to a cupboard and only got it out to try and repair it recently, because I'm using up my leave before retiring. What with lockdown, it seemed, like this blog, to be a good time to be catching up on all these sorts of things. So there we are - search, look, learn & recycle!

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