memories of .us
48 points by binjip978
48 points by binjip978
rapid growth of the internet was hard to keep up with, and besides, why did any one central entity---Jon Postel or whoever---even care about the names of all of the computers at Georgia Tech?
It was of course a woman who is now less famous than Jon Postel. :-) Elizabeth Feinler
I somehow got to run my school's lone web server for a year in high school, and it had one of those long .us addresses. I had absolutely no business doing that and should have just had a server on my own to play with, but I learned a ton. Especially when one of my classmates used an exploit to hack into it!
People seem to always design relatively narrow-and-deep trees, and then actually use broad-and-flat ones.
Yes. I find the us programmers really love to design beautiful hierarchies and then in practice the data doesn't fit nicely or at best is is just a bit more painful to use for no benefit. I see this all over in computing and am guilty of it myself.
Now whenever I see myself designing a hierarchy I stop and ask myself what value it brings. 9/10 times I realize I am doing it just because it feels good, like patting yourself on the back, rather than actually being useful. Then I stop and make the system flat. I haven't regretted this yet.
My favourite is the Ghidra class hierarchy. It’s a proper Enterprise Java OOP mess of complexity (albeit nowhere near as bad as some I’ve seen) and then they created a FlatAPI class with static methods to make it actually usable.
(not related to the article itself) Oh, what happened to the old look of the site design? I just need to read the domain name to automatically have the background image in my head. Too bad :-/
He did a redesign in September. I too, miss the old look, but his site, his redesign.
He did a redesign in September.
The new logo -- black serif typeface followed by bright red italic -- is I think a homage to the IBM OS/2 Warp 3 logo:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OS-2_Warp_Version_3_logo.svg
The old one was, of course, to AT&T's classic video explaining Unix -- I've paused it here at about 5min in showing the kernel/shell/utilities diagram:
https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?si=xeSzv1T4Lo9TZls3&t=323
That used a nested-Platonic-solids diagram:
That's echoed in the new logo.
Thanks for the link, would not have found that post on my own.
Sure, his site, his choices, but
computer.rip is now much more readable and, arguably, better looking
is the opposite of how I feel. Staring at yet another featureless wall of white with black letters is helping neither my eyes, nor my retention. Too bad, but at least the writing is still good. Maybe I'll re-add the background image using custom CSS…
I have mixed feelings about the redesign as well, the new website is intended to be more... approachable, but that also makes it a lot less distinctive. I've thought about converting the old templates for the new generator and offering an old.computer.rip as a bit of a joke about Reddit's situation. I don't think it's a huge level of effort but just not something I've gotten to yet.
I get where you are coming from (and hope I'm not being too negative). You are absolutely right about it being more approachable to what I consider "modern sensibilities". I also wouldn't necessarily give too much weight to my taste, it can be a bit influenced by my emotional attachment to things, which few people share.
It may sound silly, but the old background image (those kernel/shell cubes) remind me of old university courses and reading pages where content mattered a lot more than looks in the early oughts – and immediately made me feel a connection to the writing, and also trust it more. Brains are weird.
I actually went and added a small CSS snippet to my browser to re-add the background (sourced from the Internet Archive) and turn the font monospaced, and was three quarters of the way there, at least emotionally. YMMV.
I used to have a .us domain for my personal blog, but it turns out some really weird anti-terrorism law prevents domains with anonymous whois info on the .us gTLD, so I moved to .net.
Funny @mosburger i recently was doing some cleaning out of old domain names, and interested in registering one more...and because .US domains tend to be cheap, i was going to get one...but, then read the terms that you referenced about Whois info being QUITE public when registering a US. TLD...so, now am considering U.S. domains a no go (unless a client of course is willing to choose one knowing the implications, etc.). Nowadays (instead of .US), I lean towards .NET and .TEL. I've been registering .TEL TLDs, because they tend to be cheap, and so far no weird Whois terms. I used to love .RED (for the Spanish word meaning "web"/"net", not the color red), but the .RED domains shot up in price over the last I'd say 4 or 5 years (and across most registrars)...so must be a universal fee that ICANN (or some other entity?) adds for those or something?
Anyway, yeah, .US. TLDs are not great if privacy is of interest. :-)
Last I looked, it wasn’t obviously possible how to get an old-fashioned locality .us domain. Seems like a real pity.
OTOH, people move around a lot more than we used to, so maybe it’s good that I’m not stuck with a domain from a city I lived in 20 years ago.
The story behind the ccTLD vs gTLD distinction is pretty interesting, and has a lot more to do with the perception that big international standards for naming and addressing were potentially just around the corner. Even from the outset, the people contributing to the design of the DNS had multiple views of who it should serve and how it should be structured. I wrote about it once!
I seem to remember these being free, at least on this side of the millennium.
I only remember them widely used in period for k12 and community colleges. The later graduated to .edu and the former seems to have a diaspora to main TLDs.
