Comment by GuB-42
6 days ago
The article doesn't seem to make it its mind about whether it was the web 20 or 25 years ago. Very different actually
- 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement
25 years ago there was a good chance you were on dialup and couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement
- 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps
25 years ago: Google Maps?
- 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life
25 years ago: Women on the internet?
- 20 years ago, you could go on Facebook
25 years ago: Facebook?
"couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement" - it was early days but DSL was a thing, though expensive. But you could get a static IP address (which I still have! though when, not if, I have to change ISPs I'll lose that - another "good old days" thing) and fulltime internet access from your own box was a novelty. That's why I registered a domain (which I still have) and a friend said hey, you can get yourname@yourdomain email address and I can help you set it up! That was around 2002, give or take. I used that until "google apps for your domain" came along and let me port yourname@yourdomain to a Google account.
It was such a novelty that I let friends and family have accounts on the box to host their own web stuff. The Google Maps hack wasn't exactly 20 years ago, possibly 2005-2006; I know that Gmaps (not Google Satellite) was a novelty, and still since "everything in the cloud" wasn't the default yet (as you point out, dialup was still the norm), a friend wanted to stitch together a big map of our area out of Gmaps tiles to use offline.
Facebook: I got on in 2007 and felt late to the game already. Possibly exactly 20 years ago it didn't exist but close enough.
As for online dating, that was just the thing! And here the date is spot on; I was active from 2003 to 2005. It wasn't just geeks any more. There were women. Lots of them. Just like a bit later everyone was on Facebook, at the time pretty much everyone who was single was trying online dating. But the "shareholder value" ensh*ttification was still in the future, and fake profiles weren't a significant factor. It was just lonelyhearts ads on steroids, and it worked. The other couples (20 years and going) that I know it worked for were "almosts" from my own dating that I stayed in touch with, simple as that. I was at a couple of the weddings!
> 25 years ago: Women on the internet?
This kind of reaction is (partly) why the women on the internet that I knew rarely disclosed their gender 25 years ago