Ira Cogan

(made edits 4/9/26)

Anil Dash with a little history of markdown. I love markdown. I love Microsoft Word too, but I don't use a lot on there when writing for this thing. I used to start the draft over there and finish over here. But lately I've come to realize as much as I love Word for a lot of things, I actually get around to finishing more when I start over here, and then I just copy, paste, and save a copy over there. I also enjoy reading Dash's stuff. Part of the reason it's easier for me to actually get started and get around to finishing is markdown. Fascinating stuff. here’s a quote:

So far, these were all things we could have foreseen when John first unleashed his little text tool on the world. I would have been surprised about how many people were using it, but not really the ways in which they were using it. If you’d have said “Twenty years in the future, all the different note-taking apps people use save their files using Markdown!”, I would have said, “Okay, that makes sense!” What I wouldn’t have asked, though, was “Is John getting paid?” As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead. (We didn’t have the word “enshittification” yet, but we did have Cory Doctorow and we did have plain text files, so we kind of knew where things were headed.)

To give a sense of the vibe of that era, the term “podcasting” had been coined just a month before Markdown was released, and went into wider use that fall, and was similarly a radically open system that wasn’t owned by any big company and that empowered people to do whatever they wanted to do to express themselves. (And podcasting was another technology that Aaron Swartz helped improve by being a brilliant pain in the ass. But I’ll save that story for another book-length essay.)

Gladys West, a mathematician whose work helped create GPS recently passed away at the age of 95.

David Farber, a computer scientist who helped create and shape the internet recently passed away.

I was out walking the dog this morning and I saw a write.as sticker in my neighborhood. NYC is a small world sometimes. write.as is the platform I write thing on. Brooklyn 3/7/26

-Ira