It’s Only When You Look Back

21 points by mdr

mdr

I don't recall seeing a recent demographic breakdown of lobste.rs - out of interest, how much of this does anyone else remember? Hot Grits-era Slashdot, Kuro5hin.org, XFree86, Linux 2.2, Zip disks, Netscape Navigator etc?

I tend to read all the comments here in my own internal voice, so I'm curious how much my own history and experience is shared here. Or am I properly in "old fart" territory now? :P

kolja
The article ends in an optimistic way I can't agree with, but the old stuff I know ;-)

Just for fun, I'll play the game:
- Of Slashdot I only know the not-hot-grits-dept (was a lurker, don't remember many details).
- Nope.
- Well, it was the X server to use, at least until Xorg came along.
- Every kernel release note contained something a friend or I could use, and some 2.x was definitely my first kernel in use.
- Never used them, but a friend's dad had an external drive they used to copy stuff from the upstairs computer to that blazingly fast Pentium downstairs.
- Slightly before my time. First browser that left a lasting impression was Opera with its mouse gestures. Mozilla was "bloated", but ~~Phoenix~~ ~~Firebird~~ Firefox was shiny, and FOSS, and therefore welcomed with open arms. Also it made IEs quirks horribly evident, and got installed onto every machine left unattended and in reach.
- mdr
  
  Phoenix! That sparked a memory, I now remember it was called that for the first few releases. Had some fancy orange buttons if I remember right? The other big open-sourcing event that I think happened in around the same timeframe was StarOffice turning into OpenOffice although the first releases of that didn't even have printing support if I remember right.
  
  I did try to keep the article upbeat - thing is, I still love the technology and it's been such an important part of my life for so long now, "geek" is really one of the main ways that I define myself.
  
  True, much of the 'web is slowly turning into a politically fractured, government controlled AI slopfest and I find myself increasingly disconnecting from it in the same way that I've stopped watching the news for my mental health. I'm glad to see that there are still some holdouts (like here) that remain focussed on the fun stuff. I can only remain hopeful though that some semblance of what I used to love still remains in another 25 years - even if it's just in little pockets off the beaten path.
iandavis

Remember all those and will add Eudora, Winsock, Compuserve (ugh), NNTP, Enlightenment, Slackware.
- mdr
  
  Wow, Eudora. Memory unlocked. Company I used to work for as a summer job had an office full of classic Mac machines, some of which (specially blessed ones) were running Eudora for "Internet Email". For some reason there was another email client which they used for solely internal messaging, I forget which. I recall one oddity as well in that they had a TCP/IP network, but no DHCP server so all addresses were manually assigned and we used a FileMaker Pro database to keep track of the inventory.
  
  By the time I ended up back there after University (which is where I started my WEBMASTER work), they had all been replaced with Windows NT 4 boxes, and Windows NT server on the back end which I found to be a major step back in both departments - NT server was laughably bad at the time, and that's what fuelled my one-person rampage of "installing Linux on old desktop PCs" and replacing fileservers, print servers and internet firewalls (Smoothwall I think?) thereby greatly improving the uptime :P
  
  I only vaguely remember NNTP as some of the old BBS systems had a usenet feed, although I do remember the takeover of Deja News by Google Groups :(
sjamaan

I think you're only slightly older than me. I started with a hand-me-down C64, after it was considered "outdated", then moved to DOS with Q(uick)BASIC and then Windows with Netscape 3 (or maybe 4?) on a 56k dial-up modem. I think BBS was before my time, never used any. I do remember Altavista as "the" search, and Geocities as the place to be when you wanted a free website. And pre-Microsoft Hotmail. I fondly remember playing an online game called Utopia in high school, looks like it's still around!

I remember Kuro5hin and Slashdot, but only incidentally. I mostly hung around a lot on gamedev.net as a teen because I (of course) dreamed of making computer games. Never finished (or even really started...) anything though.

I also switched to Linux in high school. RedHat 5.2, IIRC (so a 2.0 kernel?). After messing around with SuSE and Slackware I switched to NetBSD and stuck with it for about a decade and a half, well after it became impractical. Used Enlightenment (15? 16 for sure) for a while in college because of its eye-candy (yes, also with Bluesteel). Messed around with C a bit, but really fell in love with the Scheme programming language. I happened to study AI (before the LLM stuff), so Lisp was taught as a matter of course. Rolled into the CHICKEN community by dabbling in web development (with Scheme, obviously).

Funny enough, my first job was with Ruby on Rails! I always enjoyed working on the foundational stuff, so I naturally ended up finding and massively improving Cells, a plug-in for Rails to make views more composable.

Started to use PHP in the 4-5 transitional era, remembering the growing pains of call-by-value to call-by-reference semantics (but only for objects... with all the weirdness and faint whiff of FP that implied for e.g. arrays). Then a bit of Python and now mostly Clojure.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
- mdr
  
  Wow, there's a lot of overlap there! I won't hold the C64 against you, but there was a fierce playground rivalry between that and the Spectrum ;) To be honest, I have to admit the C64 absolutely wiped the floor with the Spectrum. The Speccy was just so ... crap - but in a loveable British quirky way - it's always going to have a special place in my heart.
  
  I started my Unix experiments actually with NetBSD as I got it running on my accelerated Amiga, but never did much with it. I remember trying RedHat 5.x and not getting particularly far, although encountering it again at university also coincided with the launch of a UK magazine called "Linux Answers" (later "Linux Format"). First edition had a copy of RH6.0 on the front, and I got that going in 1GB disk space and 16Mb of memory for a long while. Also mucked about with Slackware and SuSE for a while, and settled on Mandrake for the final few years of University.
  
  I really like the look of Cells! Starred it, will have a proper look later, but it seems like it would fit in very nicely with my way of slicing & copying chunks of Rails UI code with partials. And yeah, the PHP 4-> 5 period was interesting if a little volatile. I remember Zend really pushing their management UI and accelerator/opcode cache and trying to make it big in the ENTERPRISE but there was a bunch of stuff that just flat out didn't work. Not helped by the fact that we were probably one of the last holdouts on Solaris back then as well.
gcupc

Yeah, I was there for all of those. And non-professionally, earlier stuff like NCSA Mosaic, UMN Gopher, Mac System 7, OS/2 2.x, Windows 3.x, DOS 5.
zaphar

I remember all of those. But I'm ancient by internet standards.
wrs
I have about ten years on this author, I think? And I got into computers very young. So I remember all that, plus stuff like
- the KIM-1
- using an Apple ][ with an RF modulator and a TV
- VAXen running BSD 4.1 with ten concurrent users
- TECO Emacs on the DECsystem-20
- getting open source apps by requesting a 9-track tape with a paper letter
- searching the internet using Archie to find FTP sites
- telnet-ing to an ITS system at MIT that still had no passwords
- Usenet and uucp email in its heyday
- opening up my original Mac (with 512k upgrade) to install a godawful hack that gave it a SCSI port and an internal 20MB hard drive
At one point I had an account on apple.com — literally a BSD user account on the single VAX that was apple.com. It had a little over 1GB of disks attached to it, which was quite impressive.

So all this interweb nonsense still seems a little crazy to me. :)

(Edit: more stuff)
kghose

Slashdot, sourceforge (sob), geocities (sob?), XFree86 = installing linux is a research project, Zip Disks for data storage but only for a year-they became obsolete in a blink, Netscape Navigator (wow, the web), pine (wow, can write letters to people around the world for free, instantly), finger (wow: all the people logged in!), ssh (OMG: im on this ancient DEC terminal and I can use that giant machine in the other building), ssh with x forwarding, O2 machines (OMG, Silicon Graphics is the coolest company!)

dvicente

I recently started emulating PS2 in my PC and I knew it already, but never stopped to think about it: PS2 memory cards where 8MB and they were around 20-30€, if I recall correctly.

mdr

I remember 512Kb RAM expansions for the Amiga, and my first hard drive was a whopping 40MB. Cost a small fortune at the time as well!