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Comment by eljimmy

11 years ago

I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.

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eljimmy

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bliti  11 years ago

Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly Go is without getting hate email for weeks...

  • hellofunk  11 years ago

    A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking, improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on HN in recent weeks).

    • bliti  11 years ago

      I'll make sure to revisit Clojure again, thank you. Any specific recommendation as to where to start looking?

mhd  11 years ago

I also miss the default gray background pages and the original horizontal rule (apparently you can't get that old inset look anymore).

  • chrisco255  11 years ago

    You can achieve this with pseudo elements easy.

    • mhd  11 years ago

      I think you and me might have different definitions of "easy" ;)

      But, yes, I tried, and failed horribly to get an exact replica of the <hr> of the old Netscape about window[0]. Incidentally, back then I thought the introduction of <hr noshade> was the bee's knees.

      [0]: http://i.imgur.com/WZfGllF.gif

kawsper  11 years ago

Me too.

It felt like everyone and their dog had a website using websites like Geocities. In Denmark we had Subnet.dk and (lesser known) Whitehat.dk.

It seems like that culture is now gone, and people have went to social networks, which is more pulling content than pushing it I guess.

On the other hand it is easier to share content today, on Facebook, Reddit or Imgur but it feels different than visiting a random website and explore the universe of that domain.