Comment by scrapcode
5 days ago
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
DSL v. CableModel crew, checking in. Also got online in early 90s, first with a 14.4k via several janky adapters (none intended for interwebs). Also first with cable internet, circa 1998, in my redneck part of the world (Texas) – Dad got tired of the phoneline never working.
Decades later, I worked datacenters, including those with the last gasps of usenet – what a time to have been alive on the internet. Back then, it truly was a place where nobody knew you were a dog/kid/disabled/whatever (primarily text-based experience).
I remember at DefCon (LasVegas hackercon) ~2010, I ran in to somebody that had run a competing tech corner of the mid-90s internet; we chuckled that we both were obviously younger than our childhood text-based personæ had even purveyed having been, back then – we met, decades later, still in our twenties =P
I never made it to any hackercons, and haven't kept up with many of the folks I "ran" with back in the day (before social media). And I'm not really sure if I would even remember their handles and such if I saw them today. I remember a fella that went by "proph3t," I believe he was in a band or at least helped with George Smith's website End Effect (looks like it is still up). That guy was a bit older than I was but I remember him being extremely patient and gracious with his time helping me when I was learning PHP.
Love the post. It brought me back.
The layer of builders and hackers is still there.
But now the vast majority of people have their own hyper lanes on the Worldwide Information Superhighway.
And geez, isn't that a noisy highway? We're somewhere way under that thing.
> The layer of builders and hackers is still there.
Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.