PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones

Australia is discovering Facebook, and I have recently seen friends joining.

But I will always be too old for social networks.  To join any of the official Melb Uni networks on Facebook you need a college email address.

Back in my day, kre was handling all mail and domains for Australia, and all machines in the computer science department had names beginning with "mu" so they were globally (as in world-wide) unique. This convention had only just been obsoleted by domain name addressing.  [See Electronic Addresses in Fifty Years of Computing at the University of Melbourne]. The Computer Science department had adopted the .cs.mu.OZ.AU domain and I never came near a .edu account.

Out of curiosity, I enter my old, long disabled, email address on Facebook.  The response: "Please enter a valid email for the network".  Luckily, I suspect I don't really want to belong to such a big group (if it is that), where what little I have in common with most people will be even further diluted as each year passes.  I'm happy enough to stick with receiving the official Alumni magazine in the mail.

There is some good news:  University of Melbourne Science Common Room has just been created, which is really where I got my education . . .