Nando

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents
1 Inception
2 Technology
2.1 Networking
2.2 BBS Technology
3 Why 'Nando'?
4 'LHP' and 'CBGL'
5 Nando Times
6 News content
7 Hot Java
8 McClatchy buys Nando
9 Toward the end
10 External links

Inception
Nando was produced by the New Media division of The News & Observer newspaper in
Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1993 George Schlukbier[1] (http://www.google.com/search?q=
george+schlukbier&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client
=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official), a news librarian from McClatchy Newspapers
became the first New Media Director, hired by Frank Daniels III, editor of the daily paper,
to build this new division. The core developers for this effort to prove the Internet was a
better partner for newspapers than AOL or Prodigy, were Dave Livingston (nicknamed
Nando PC badge
"Sleepy Squirrel"), Charles Hall, James Calloway, Alfred Filler, Fraser Van Asch, "Zonker"
Harris, Mike Emmett and Schlukbier. This team built a GUI to the Internet using The
Major BBS as a front end, extended to use traditional Internet applications such as Gopher, WAIS, Lynx and
Telnet. With this ad-hoc system, Nando.net provided classified news and became a commercial Internet service
provider (ISP) in North Carolina's Research Triangle area, which encompasses Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel
Hill.

Technology
Networking
In 1993 networking standards were not as pervasive as they are now.
The newspaper publishing tools were based on proprietary networking
cards and terminals used with a Tandem mini-computer. AppleTalk over
coax cable was the way Macintoshs communicated. Windows 3.1 did
not even have a network layer installed by default.
Into this mix came a Sun SPARC computer. Transferring data from the
Tandem to the SPARC, required a common interface, and that interface
was X.25. X.25, although developed for satellite communication, was
one of the few standards actually implemented by most hardware
vendors.

Nando 1993 - racks not full yet

BBS Technology
Before the Web, most people accessed remote computers via dumb
terminal emulators running on their PCs. BBS systems came in two
flavors: DOS based and proprietary. DOS based systems required one
PC and one modem for each incoming phone line. It was not uncommon
for a BBS to have a hundred IBM PCs stacked up next to shelves of a
hundred modems.
The advantage of the proprietary systems (such as GalactiComm) was
that they used special software and hardware to handle more than one
user on a single PC. The GalactiComm hardware supported up to sixteen
serial cards, each with multiple RS-232 ports.
The GalactiComm software also supported the X.25 protocol, so there
was a path between all the various systems, however circuitous it
appears from today's perspective.

Nando floppy with free software

With the arrival of the World Wide Web, users no longer needed a terminal emulator (or a BBS). Instead, they
now required a network layer for their Windows 3.1 PC. The Nando Help Desk answered telephone enquiries
regarding "the web" (then in its infancy), and assisted new users with the process of downloading the required
TCP/IP network software via the BBS or floppy disk, then installing both it and a browser (such as Mosaic).

Why 'Nando'?
The News & Observer newspaper's nickname, "The N&O," gave the site its name, presented online as NandO or
Nando, apparently after the newspaper's News Library staff pointed out that the ampersand would create
difficultes in database construction and so coined the title of NandO, according to Teresa Leonard, chief
librarian of The News & Observer. The electronic edition went far beyond the original content of the North
Carolina paper, which eventually was shifted to a different Web address [at http://newsobserver.com]
maintained by a separate staff.

'LHP' and 'CBGL'

The leaders of this emerging phenomenon gave themselves imaginative
titles, a bit of whimsy that set a wacky, free-flying tone for company
atmosphere and morale. Frank Daniels III was LHP, for "Lord High
Protector." George Schlukbier was CBGL, for "Chief Bull Goose
Looney." Employees followed suit with their own job titles. As in other
internet start-up companies, there was frenzied activity 24-hours a day,
seven days a week. A company lore evolved, with numerous stories such
as the one about installing system upgrades and dropping dial-up
customers by the rack. Even the FBI were regular players. During the
period when Kevin Mitnick was America's most-wanted computer
hacker (19941995) he was living in Raleigh and using cell phones to
hack into ISP's and then telneting into unsuspecting UNIX servers (like
Nando) and creating directories/files and deleting all traces. Nando
Christmas gift to Nando staff
technicians tried, but never quite managed, to get a fix on Mitnick's
location. All the while, the company was in communication with the
FBI. In fact, it was required to be in touch with the FBI. During this period, increasingly computer-savvy young
people were starting to figure out the holes in Unix. Life was changing at Nando.

Nando Times
In 1994 Nando.net added a Web server and a Mosaic-compatible website front end, and the NandO Times was
bornone of the first updated-around-the-clock news and sports websites. Nando invented its own model of
how newspapers could handle online production, news, sales and help desks while developing new online
products.
At first, News & Observer copy desk staff (called sub-editors in the UK) fed stories to the Nando Times from
the newspaper's main newsroom, using aging SII newswire editing terminals to add intermediate mark-up codes
for further processing into HTML. Nando developers figured out how to semi-automate newswire story
conversion and posting of news photos to the site, including an early Java-powered animated photo display,
although the photos were never fully integrated with related stories.
Shortly before the Daniels family sold the News & Observer company to the McClatchy newspaper chain,
Nando and the online News & Observer became separate operations and Nando editors moved into a separate
building. Seth Effron became Nando's executive editor, Zonker Harris was the managing editor, Mike Emmett,
who had a long career as a writer and editor with several of the U.S.'s largest dailies, was the sports editor, while
Bruce Siceloff headed the NewsObserver.com staff. Michael Carmean, who had headed the copydesk staff,
departed. Other early Nando personnel included Charles S. Powell (the "Evangelist"), Beth Ames, Fraser Van
Asch, Lisa Pignetti, Gene Wang, Kirk House, Ari Spanos, Alfred Filler, Denise Long, Joe Sterling, Joyce
Garcia, Dawn Harris and Sam Barnes. Barnes sometimes worked from the office of the N&O-owned Chapel
Hill News, inspiring Bob Stepno, a Nando part-timer and University of North Carolina journalism doctoral
student, to move his weekend morning shift there. In 2000, Schlukbier and Total Sports parted ways. Also
leaving were Emmett and Harris, who both went to Miami to work for Terra.com, the world's largest Hispanic
Web site. Emmett moved onto to Time Warner/CNN as managing editor of NASCAR.com, then Greenville
Online as assistant editor and finally, before retiring, Media General's Western Carolina Regional Manager.
Harris continues to work for the Daniels family and is based in Cary, N.C.

Services Nando provided in 1994:

Classifieds
International News
National News
Regional and Local News
Sports
Business
Lifestyle
Interactive Websites for Valentine's Day and most major holidays.
Games, including Mutants and Hangman.
Chats
ISP service including the first Nando Doctor, Kirk House.
House made "House calls" to help users set up the dial-up service.
Help Desk
NIE ("Newspapers In Education") programs- NandOLand, free
access to the internet for schools

Nando Land logo

After the McClatchy merger, Nando New Media evolved into McClatchy New Media, with the output of the
Nando newsroom channelled to the "24 Hour News" section of all McClatchy newspapers' websites.

News content
The Nando Times employed a round-the-clock crew of news editors, who reprocessed almost all of the News &
Observer's incoming wire service feeds -- Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scripps-Howard, Bloomberg and morea year or before most of those
news organizations created their own Web sites, and apparently before the wire services recognized an "online
edition" as something separate from the printed newspaper. AP and Nando soon became allies in developing the
model of how newspapers would use wire services.
Nando editors selected stories, wrote fresh headlines and sorted the wire service stories into news category
pagesNational, World, Political, Sports, Business etc. Nando's editors sometimes created "combined wires"
stories or rewrote story leads. The Nando Times briefly experimented with original news reporting, including
sports and election coverage, but became almost exclusively an aggregator and enhancer of news from
traditional news services.
Nando excelled at posting "topic" pages carrying dozens of links for developing stories, such as the April, 1995,
Oklahoma City bombing[2] (http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2006) and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales
[3] (http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/diana/). (The Diana memorial pages, hundreds of headlines and
pictures from Aug. 31 through Sept. 26, 1997, were among the last documents left on the Nando site in March
2005, although the linked headline stories had expired from the server.)

Hot Java
Nando Times experimented with Java programming early, creating a Java-powered rotation of news photos on
its home page in 1996, linked to photo gallery pages. Behind the scenes, the most lasting demonstration of
Nando Media's Java programming was its Digital Work Bench content management system. The Java-based

CMS was written from the ground up starting in 1999 by the company's development team, becoming the
default publishing system for the Nando Times. It was later adopted by several McClatchy properties and was
eventually re-written entirely in Perl.

McClatchy buys Nando

The Nando "brand" became known quickly and was credited with enhancing the value of the News & Observer
corporation, which the Daniels family sold in 1995 to the California-based McClatchy newspaper chain [4] (http
://www.mcclatchy.com/about/). (The News & Observer's 1995 efforts also had included a computer-assisted
investigation of the North Carolina hog industry [5] (http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1996/public-service/works/ab
out.html), which won it the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.)

Toward the end

After the sale, McClatchy abandoned Nando's dial-up ISP business (sold to MindSpring, now part of EarthLink)
and cut back its exploration of original news coverage, which had included the 1996 election campaign [6] (http
://archives.cjr.org/year/96/1/trail.asp). McClatchy shifted the focus of "Nando New Media" to serve its
newspapers and other clients, while Frank Daniels III and other early Nando executives left to create Internet
startups focused on community news (Koz) and sports (Total Sports).
With Nando's changing role, The News & Observer established an interactive media division in 1997, led by
Mark Choate. The new division produced newsobserver.com, an online newspaper publishing local news and
advertising, as a complement to the national and international news published by Nando. Under Choate's
direction, newsobserver.com quickly became one of the leading local newspaper web sites in the country. By
2001, The Media Audit ranked newsobserver.com third in the nation in terms of local market penetration for
online newspapers, trailing washingtonpost.com and austin360.com. In that same year, Editor & Publisher
awarded newsobserver.com with an EPpy, naming it the best online newspaper service in its circulation
category.
The Nando Times pages were discontinued May 27, 2003, replaced with a "Dear readers" page of explanation,
with a directory of McClatchy papers' individual sites where the former Nando Times content could be found.
The editorial staff continued to process wire stories, which fed the "24 hour news" [7] (http://www.sacbee.com/
24hour/) sections of other McClatchy properties, such as NewsObserver [8] (http://newsobserver.com) and
SacBee [9] (http://sacbee.com).
The Nando brand was abandoned by the McClatchy Company on March 3, 2005 in favor of the name
McClatchy Interactive.

External links
The McClatchy Company [10] (http://www.mcclatchy.com/)
Archived Nando pages from 1996-2006 [11] (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nando.net)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nando&oldid=709681536"
Categories: The News & Observer American news websites Internet properties established in 1993

This page was last modified on 12 March 2016, at 11:41.

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