(Re)Introducing… A Little Bit

“Steve, what do you mean by ‘a little bit’?”

The Little Bit is the message/post format I introduced back in 1993 for internal corporate communications that resembles the earlier 1992 message/post format I introduced, the Quick Quip.

Quick Quip

More than a decade ago, whenever we discussed intra-company correspondence, there were a variety of small, fixed-length messaging systems created to allow for rapid impromptu information dissemination to subscribing members. Thus, the “Quick Quip”: a 256-character limited message rammed through a series of message routes to subscribers. To get the entire concept or idea across in a single message, these tended to be limited to direct-but-very-short-and-succinct quotes from certain individuals. But sometimes certain ideas could not be conveyed in a single message.

Little Bit

Enter the “Little Bit” message format: a 1,024-character limited message (in older systems, being represented as a four 256-character message ordered series) pushed through the message routes to subscribers. The content format changed somewhat to more of a short summarization of an event or news story.

Little Bit More

Even more details about a given story would be possible by providing a fixed-length ID at the beginning of a Little Bit and then reusing that ID on subsequent Little Bits to depict a follow-up message. Since Little Bits were distributed in implied chronological order (or later, with explicit timestamps in the message headers), additional Little Bits with the same ID were “Little Bits More”.

Return of the Little Bit

So, for Javamancy, I’d like to bring the Little Bit in a blog-ified form to you.

Short summaries that amount to nice-to-knows or other short story items.

‘Nuf said. (At least for now… )

Tagged as: Javamancy, Little Bit, Little Bit More, Quick Quip