From: squatter (squatter@dds.nl)
Date: 10/21/00
Wat doet de ascii in een amerikaans technologie-investeerdersblad? Wellicht
kunnen we op hun benefiet ook aandelen kopen???
Red Herring:
October 21, 2000
Good stuff
ASCII salvages junk.
By Kenneth Neil Cukier
From the October 2000 issue
Around the corner from a tranquil canal in Amsterdam is
a radically new-age cybercafe, a sort of Amnesty
International-meets-Scott McNealy. Anti-Microsoft
(Nasdaq: MSFT) to the core, it's called ASCII -- not the
7-bit digital Roman alphabet, but the Amsterdam
Subversive Code for Information Interchange. It might
represent the future of the Internet zeitgeist, a testament
to how good people can put the Net to good uses, an almost
forgotten concept in this age of dot-com greed.
Located in a small basement underneath an anarchist
bookshop, ASCII is a coöperative comprised of around 30
volunteers who rejigger archaic computers from the '80s
to mid-'90s so they work essentially as network
computers, useful for surfing the Net and not much else.
Vintage office IBMs, Apples, PC Ataris, and odd East
German computers dot the tables. Heavy wires worm
along the walls and stream down from the ceiling like
cyber stalactites in a digital dungeon. And, of course, it all
runs on Linux.
The ASCII project is a humanitarian one above all. With
donated computers, techies donate their time to bring
Internet access and computer hardware to youth
organizations and schools in low-income areas of the
Netherlands. As a cybercafe, ASCII is as noncommercial
as it gets. Surfing the Net is free, and bottles of beer are
sold just slightly above cost to pay rent (the group worked
in a squat until it got evicted).
As one volunteer engineer put it, ASCII's aim is to prove
that the IT industry's upgrade ethos and reliance on
Microsoft is unnecessary. The ASCII Web site is at
http://squat.net/ascii.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Additional information on ASCII from the group's Web
site.
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