On 4/16/95, all UK phone numbers changed. Insert a "1" after the initial "0" in UK area codes. Entirely new area codes are needed for Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, and Bristol. [UBT Newsletter, 3/31/95.]

Delphi now offers an AI Forum, at "GO CUST 206". [Will Dwinnell , comp.ai.neural-nets, 4/4/95. Bill Park.]

Futurist and net.personality Tom Mandel has died of cancer. See the "publetter" in TIME magazine for a picture and obituary. Tom has been moderating TIME's forum on AOL for the past 18 months. [Philip Elmer-DeWitt, alt.culture.internet, 4/14/95.] (Mandel was at SRI when I was there. We both contributed to the TEAM management newsletter, one of many precursors of my Computists' Communique style. I was enjoying contact with the management side of SRI, hoping that it would broaden my career. It did, but through personal growth and self-confidence rather than contacts and professional networking. Tom -- born 1946 -- was four years older than I, and had a bit of a head start. I saw the Internet as a tool for scientists; he was more interested in the social effects of networking.)

"Before the coming of the Internet, the only image we had of large numbers of people working together was the image of the crowd and the crowd-like mass hysteria that can be induced by modern one-way mass communication, where one person's nightmare becomes projected onto the many and becomes their nightmare as well. We had come to presume -- from the examples of history and the writings of novelists and philosophers --- that an individual in isolation -- Thoreau alone on a hillside -- is more likely to be good and rational than any large group of people. ... Today the culture of the Internet reveals vast and unexpected human potential for unselfish collaboration." -- Richard Seltzer , Internet-on-a-Disk, 2/95. (Compare with Charles Mackay's classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (1841). But we did have the quilting bee, barn raising, and festivals or local churches as models of cooperative groups.)

The Yahoo service will soon add online advertising to its WWW directory service, as part of a deal with Sequoia Capital. Jerry Yang, 26, and David Filo, 28, the two Stanford students who started it as a hobby, will be taking leave of absence to run Yahoo full-time and make it even better. "The power of the Internet is that anyone can be a player." draws 20K hits per day. [WEBster, 4/17/95. Also WSJ, 4/11/95, B5; EDUPAGE.] (Their Sequoia Capital contact is Michael Moritz, who likes the Yahoo's whimsey and notoriety. Sequoia has also backed Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Global Village Communications, and Electronics Arts.)

David Brown is collecting web pages on AI in Design projects worldwide. See or contact . [comp.ai, 3/29/95. David Joslin.]

In V5 N12, I mentioned Bob Rankin's $5 "Doctor Bob" Internet guides on First Virtual's InfoHaus server. I just ran across Rankin's review of the InfoHaus service. Vendors pay just $10 to start selling information products online. Buyers download the product, then respond YES or NO to a follow-up email asking if they are willing to pay for it (by automated credit-card debit). Either way, the seller is notified. Frequent freeloaders can be barred from using the InfoHaus. Rankin reports that all of the early downloaders paid, which certainly beats his shareware success. . [, SEML, 1/29/95.] (Shareware still reaches more people, though.)

"Doctor Bob's Guide to Accessing The Internet By E-Mail" can help you get FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, WWW, and Usenet newsgroup services. Send a "GET INTERNET BY-EMAIL NETTRAIN F=MAIL" message to , or "send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email" to . In Europe, it's "send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt" to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk. [Bits & Bytes, 1/26/95.]