[ih] Another history question -- Tiananmen Square

[Larry Sheldon]

On 6/6/2013 12:16 PM, Ofer Inbar wrote:
> Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon at cox.net> wrote:
>> I said I thought that the technological enabler in those protests was
>> the PC-connected printer.
>>
>> But now I am worried that I am wrong about that too.  I do think I
>> remember reading that somewhere at the time--but I don't have a notion
>> now about how they passed data around.  Disks?  BBSs?
>
> Coming at it from the other direction, you might look at how the
> Chinese dissidents saw it at the time.  If you're interested in
> spending some time on this question, contact Brandeis University
> and see if they have proceedings or recordings of a conference
> held there in the fall of 1989.  One of the student leaders of
> the protest managed to get out of the country because he had already
> been approved for a visa to study at Brandeis, and he organized this
> conference shortly after he got to the US.  IIRC it was a big magnet
> event for anyone involved who'd managed to get out of China, and
> there were likely panels and presentations on the topic of what
> technology they used or how they communicated, among other things.

Wow.  I will look into it--I was interested at the time but was in the 
process of dumping a near-thirty year career and moving half-way across 
the continent--from an arm of what had been the world's largest 
corporation to a small mid-western Jesuit university peopled by 
Luddites.  In any case I did not attend to world politics as I might 
have and I'd sort of forgotten about what was going on in the late 80's.

> BTW, Brandeis University didn't even have Internet at the time.
> The first Internet connection came in January 1990, shortly after.
> In the fall of 1989 Brandeis was on CSnet and BITNET.

We didn't even have that except for a few dial-in-diehards until '91 or 
'92, I think.

Thanks for the info.

-- 
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