Thursday afternoon. Someone’s put the Cup sweep up in the kitchen and I’ve drawn a horse that’s already been scratched.

The first message ever sent over the internet, 57 years ago today, was “lo”.

• At 10:30 at night on 29 October 1969, a UCLA student called Charley Kline sat down to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, up the coast in Menlo Park, over the brand new ARPANET.
• He typed the L, then the O, and Bill Duvall at the other end confirmed each letter over the phone as it came through.
• Before the G arrived the Stanford machine crashed, because it was expecting 10 characters a second and the network was sending 5,000, which Duvall compared to filling a glass with a fire hose.
• He had it running again about an hour later, so the first thing ever sent across the internet was “lo”, followed by an hour of IT support.

Live Science →

Archer didn’t walk to the first Melbourne Cup.

• The story everyone knows is that Archer walked all the way from Nowra, on the NSW south coast, to win the first Cup in 1861.
• He actually went by ship, with two stablemates for company, and the walk is a myth that has outlasted everyone who could have corrected it.
• He still won, from 17 starters, three of whom fell, and the prize was 710 gold sovereigns and a hand-beaten gold watch, because there wasn’t a cup yet.
• He won again in 1862, but his entry for 1863 missed the deadline because of a Victorian public holiday, so he was knocked out of the Melbourne Cup by a day off.

State Library Victoria →

Casual Friday was invented to sell shirts.

• In the early 1960s Hawaii’s garment makers, organised as the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, wanted office workers in aloha shirts instead of suits.
• Its president, Bill Foster, called the campaign Operation Liberation and gave every member of the Hawaii House and Senate two shirts each.
• It stuck in 1966 as Aloha Friday, and the idea of dressing down at the end of the week slowly made its way to offices on the mainland.
• In 1992 Dockers mailed an eight-page Guide to Casual Business Wear to about 25,000 HR managers, which is how a shirt promotion became a workplace policy.

Mental Floss →

The longer one

The bid he turned down

Open the freezer at a servo and the two big names are usually Streets and Peters. Streets, with the Paddle Pop and the Gaytime, now belongs to the Magnum Ice Cream Company, which Unilever spun off last December. Peters, along with New Zealand’s Tip Top, belongs to Froneri. The split goes back about a hundred years, to two men in New South Wales who could not stand losing to each other.

Fred Peters got there first. He was an American from Michigan who came to Sydney on business in the 1890s, found the local ice cream was more like a yellow custard, and missed the kind his mother used to make. In 1907 he leased two rooms in an ice factory in Paddington and started making his own. By the 1920s it was being sold as “the health food of a nation”. He paid his staff a bonus tied to the dividend and kept all of them on through the Depression.

Ted Street came home to Corrimal, just north of Wollongong, after the First World War and opened a grocer’s. From 1920 he hand-churned frozen custards out the back, then bolted a one-horsepower engine to the churn and started selling to shops. His wife ran the factory floor. By 1934 he’d bought the Corrimal Ice Works and was selling it as the Cream of the Coast. Both men, as it happens, were married to women called Daisy.

Peters had the shops, and Street spent the next 25 years trying to take them. He bought out another maker, Lynam’s, in 1950, worked to break Peters’ hold on distribution, and in 1953 the family brought out the Paddle Pop.

In 1960 he sold. Kraft, Unilever and Peters all bid. He took Unilever’s offer of nearly £4 million, even though Peters had offered more. The record doesn’t say why. You can probably guess.

Sixty-six years on, the two are still on opposite sides. When Unilever split off its ice cream business last year, Streets went with it. Peters was bought in 2014 by the British company that later became Froneri, which added Tip Top in 2019. The feud is now trans-Tasman, listed in Amsterdam and followed by analysts. It started with a churn and a one-horsepower engine in Corrimal.

Some people would rather leave money on the table than leave it with the bloke down the road.

Australian Dictionary of Biography →

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 12