Jump into the Time Machine: Computing in 1982

I was having a clearout recently and found some back issues of Your Computer. This was my magazine of choice for computing matters in the early 80s, and I thought it would be fun to look at some of the issues arising 30 years ago.

The July 1982 edition had cover stories for the Spectrum and ZX-81, the BBC and the Atom, as well as the Vic-20.

In the news were the launches of the Dragon 32 and the NewBrain (or at least the availability of it, some two years after the launch) and the inevitable Spectrum delays, with the first machines ordered taking up to eight weeks to deliver.

The lead article that month was written by Tim Hartnell (who I had the opportunity to work with a couple of years later) and was an introduction to the Spectrum graphics and sound features that were available to those who were lucky enough to have received their machines.

Are you making the most of LinkedIn?

Earlier this year I started extracting network data from LinkedIn via the LinkedIn API. There are some earlier posts about how this can be done, and a couple more looking at the data over the first couple of months for which I was able to compile a proper data set.

Since then I've been compiling more data and now seems a good time to look at how my network has grown, and the extent to which my connections make use of LinkedIn.

My network has grown by around 10% since I first started accumulating data, and one of the consequences of accumulating that data (as there is a limit to what you can retrieve in any one request) is the inevitable lack of historical data for new connections.

However, this effect can be lessened by only reporting activities within the last calendar month, which is the report I'm currently producing. That data can then be accumulated itself, to give a month by month overview:

What's interesting is that over the 4 months shown, my network has grown, but the percentage of it making use of LinkedIn features has fallen - which would imply that the new connections are not, on average, increasing the usage figures.

This suggests that LinkedIn is being used fully only by a small core group of my connections, while the remainder use it for making new connections and building their own networks, or in a lot of cases, not at all - consider the final set of bars, over a third are consistently not using LinkedIn at all in a way that can be measured.

I'll be continuing to accumulate this data over the coming months. In the meantime you can find out more about the chart above here.