On Monday, I wrote up a little story about my early days at NeXT and posted it here, and shared a link to it on mastodon (follow me here: cosocial.ca/@shayman )

On Tuesday I thought, you know what, I wonder if anybody other than my friends and relatives are reading this, so I added a little code from Tinylytics to track visitors.

On Tuesday, the post had 179 views. I thought that was pretty good.

On Wednesday, it had 209 views. Cool, someone must be sharing it.

On Thursday, 62,838. WHAT? Turns out someone who follows me on Mastodon (thank you, Matt Lee) had shared it to the popular Hacker News site, and there’s a lively discussion there about my post, and speculation about whether Steve Jobs really knew me (answer: probably not, although there might have been a brief period of time where he was vaguely aware that I worked for him in Canada) and more.

There was also some speculation about whether I had actually saved a screen shot from a 1991 NeXT email all this time. While I am not directly commenting on that, I will say that yes, I still have that NeXT cube with that message on it, and also you would be surprised at how amazing it is to run 1991 NeXTSTEP 2.1 inside your web browser courtesy of the amazing collection of virtual machines at Infinite Mac, Try NeXTSTEP 2.1 for yourself here! Open the Mail app in the dock and you can read (and listen to!) the initial greeting from Steve Jobs too.

So far on Friday, it’s had a further 29,783 views but it’s only 10:30 AM so far.

And I just learned that my little story has been retold in Japanese. It’s not a literal translation, it’s a retelling.

I am pleased to see from Tinylytics that may post has apparently been viewed

• 46,582 times in the USA
• 7,624 times in the UK
• 5,354 times in Canada
• Once each in Congo, Faroe Islands, Malawi, and the Falkland Islands.

Here’s a bit of Safari’s translation to English of a Japanese retelling of my English blog post …

Thank you to micro.blog for not crashing under the load, and I’m grateful to everybody that took the time to read, and just assume that (currently) all 103,573 are actual kind, thoughtful and reflective real people. and not bots. if you are a bot, just keep that to yourself, let me enjoy this, ok?