I'd also credit Brian Cham's blog with introducing me to the Curve-Line System. If there's someone who came up with this concept in an inchoate form before Brian (F.P. Currier?), I'm too much of a noob to know. Brian is a member of this forum, though he doesn't post much; I'd be interested to hear him talk about his influences for this system. I'll have a look at the references on his blog, too.
Can I just take a moment to point out an elephant in the room. There's a strange sort of tension in this community around the issue of references and credit for ideas. It's a bit of an article of faith in the VMS community that there are no new ideas, just an amnesiac rehash of old forgotten ones, as turnover of members progresses. Fairly frequently I see it happen that someone presents an idea or an observation in their own words and without references, and someone will reply pointing out that this idea is not original, and that credit is due to the originator of the idea. The original poster will usually reply that he was unaware of such precedent, and is glad to hear about it, as he wants to learn more, and it was not his intention to plagiarize. Sometimes this exchange is a bit less kind, depending on the participants involved.
The point being, there is very real status in this community attached to knowing the history of VMS-related discussion very well, and being able to quote it chapter and verse. If you can recall off the cuff what Jim Reed posted on the mailing list in 1995, and can tell a noobie that he better get knee deep in the mailing list archives before contributing, you're original gangster. Which is how academic disciplines work. I get it. When I studied surgery, the older surgeons could quote all the classic watershed surgery papers chapter and verse, and didn't want any young upstarts opening their mouths who couldn't. But the difference is, I knew what I was getting into, and what I signed up for. This kind of culture of seniority is not necessarily what newcomers are expecting here. I think this sort of tension over the originality of an idea and the need to credit it is potentially a real turnoff to new contributors, who might indeed have something valuable to contribute. Two solutions I'd propose to this problem:
- Compile a required reading list that all new registrants to this forum must read, and sign off on having read, before registering an account.
- Encourage kindness toward members who present unoriginal ideas as though they were original. This starts with giving someone the benefit of the doubt when he claims that he came up with the idea independently. Give him a link to older discussions of the same topic, sure. But being preemptively dismissive or shaming of someone who "should have known" that the idea he's presenting is not originally his, isn't helpful.
Which leads me to another elephant in the room: I also get that a lot of the "original gangsters" here are jaded. I sense that some are tired that they've poured so many years of efforts into this book, and have so little to show for it. And I get that the enthusiasm of noobies, particularly ones who haven't done their homework and don't realize they're talking to someone who has been studying the VMS since before they were born, is probably annoying. But I question whether our collective goal of unraveling the VMS is well served by holding everyone to rigorous standards of idea-sourcing.