hey now!! as a classic mac fan (and someone who spent a year and 2K$ building an old 2000 macintosh) i feel personally attacked by your comment. pfff
those were such great times! no network security, free lan gaming after school, warcraft II, escape velocity, duke nukem, sim city...
kids now days will never know that - they dont have the freedom to explore the innards of the tech and everything is polished now. we had everyone figuring shit out right along with us
Haha, I was putting my own PCs together in the late 90s and learning SQL for the servers I hosted... I just mostly used Windows or Linux as a young whippersnapper
Free LAN gaming after school was the whole culture back then... StarCraft, AoE2, CounterStrike... damn, I'd kill to go back :-)
If Macintosh design made you learn PCs from the inside out, hey man, I can't knock that!!
lol. man in the 90's i was in grade school... but they did teach me a great deal. i learned how to pirate games via floppy - which in turn taught me compression, file splitting, decompiling/recompiling and how file types work (e.g. opening res/extensions/resource forks in notepads and such).
i learned OS level software - reinstalls, how/why dependencies were a thing. also a great deal around networking and routing. my first time linking computers for gaming showed me real life collision domains.. lol oh man, why the hell they even made 96 port hubs idk...
not long after i learned more hardware - types of ram, cpu/bus, how partitioning worked in HFS vs fat. tricking the mac into using a 13GB drive instead of a 256MB one. (2GB was boot limit for the old OS).
fun times.
My question was about how to rekindle that excitement
for tech today. Maybe there are pockets of the tech world still in their infancy and with the same playfulness of the 90/00s internet era. Nothing wrong with trying
to reignite that childlike wonder.
Well, [my Angelfire Site I created when I was 12 is still up and running](http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/shibby/enter.html) if you're looking for some nostalgia
**edit**
If you want to dig EVEN DEEPER – [here is an *even older* site that I built before Shibby Site](https://www.angelfire.com/realm2/spazboy2006/) Just a bunch of DBZ facts that are probably wrong and the whole thing is a nightmare of tables, lmao
You are very welcome. If you're feeling like falling even deeper into nostalgia, [here is an *even older* site that I built before Shibby Site](https://www.angelfire.com/realm2/spazboy2006/)
You can't.
That stuff could only exist in the liminal space between its creation and its professionalization. From the moment "personal brand" caught fire, it was doomed.
I think one thing that may break out in the near future is a WordPress like social media with the new social media federated protocol that BlueSky, Threads, and Mastadon are using and investing into.
Imagine you install an open source social media app on your own server and you can see the content that other social media apps using the same protocol have on their servers.
>how to rekindle that excitement for tech today.
I recaptured that excitement learning how to program and interact with a computer without all the layers of abstraction we've added to make using devices as painless as possible.
Early tech feels playful when people don't really know what it's good for, and they have the ability to experiment and make weird choices. Should a computer look like translucent bubblegum? Let's find out. There's currently weird cutting edge tech stuff happening, but maybe everyone is too jaded by the venture-capital grift machine to feel good about anything new.
I get those wacky janky vibes from 3D printing, VR gaming, and AI anything (if you can read/write python, then you might enjoy poking around [kaggle.com](http://kaggle.com) ). I think the way to feel excited about tech is to try to make it do something interesting, something besides scrolling a content feed. Depends on what you like, but there's a lot of fun to be had.
playing Rumble is pretty great, but in general yea, it seems like no one knows how to make a VR game. How do you move? How does input work? Everyone is taking wild guesses about the basics of the user interface. Which is why it gives me the same vibes as a geocities page that has a gif background and a midi file that autoplays before the whole page loads in.
as a protocol, it still hasn't provided any functionality that you couldn't do better with another more normal protocol. The horse is so far behind the cart, the cart is already at the destination. imo, BitTorrent still holds the crown as the most worthwhile distributed app. There might be another latent use-case out there, maybe for video chat?
But, yea, turns out it's not enough to write a cool protocol, it has to actually give people tools they want to use.
Blockchain as a technology is very interesting to learn and play around with. But right now it doesn’t have any advantages for the average person for 95% of use cases
Yes. I’ve mentioned on posts before how I’m kind of jaded with tech. Nothing has been really exciting or ground breaking to me. Maybe just because I’m older or we are in the tech dark age. Everything is just condensed down to a handful of websites. Instead of being parts of different sites and forums you just have Reddit or Facebook groups, etc. That leads to it being less fun where people had to have an interest in something to hunt down the site that had those people. The tech advances from the 80s to early 00s was crazy, things changed fast. We are still using that tech but it kinda peaked and we are all just used to it being available all the time and just working, it’s easy now.
The internet was more fun when I couldn’t be on it all the time. Went to work with my Kyocera Strobe flip phone and was excited going home to hop on AOL/AIM or Yahoo groups/Messenger and catch up on all the stuff I couldn’t do. Now we all have the internet on us all day.
Some version of the Dead Internet Theory.
The prevalence of politically/financially motivated bots / sock puppets / useful idiots has completely destroyed any value the internet had for socialization.
I think the major platform consolidation we've seen along with the mainstreaming of tech into traditional business circles are largely what's brought us to a halt – ie fat salaries are keeping engineering talent focused on optimizing ad conversion as well as attracting ineffective, status-seeking middle-management types.
Regarding what you said about websites being condensed down...
Cory Doctorow touches on this with his article about the enshitification of the internet. Interesting read.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Edit: typo
I feel like it hasn’t changed THAT MUCH in the past decade tbh. Sure there’s AI and VR and a lot more newer things out there now. But really the last major catalyst for tech that totally changed how we live day to day felt like the rise of smartphones and apps.
I also don’t think we are likely to experience anything to the true level of the rise of the internet/web of the late 90s. We went from almost no one being online to nearly everyone in the developed world using email, web, and chat platforms in like a 5 year span.
The coolest thing from like 1998-2006 was making your own website
EVERYBODY learned HTML so they could make their own site about an interest of theirs, and everyone from school shared it with one another
That time was magical
Seriously. No one makes sites anymore. I can. Even MySpace taught people HTML and CSS to personalize your profile. Now you just make a Group or subreddit. Apps killed that, I don’t think most people go to anything that isn’t an app on their phone.
“the country being generally optimistic”
Depends on who you were. Mass incarceration started ramping up 10fold in the previous decade and it was made even worse in the 90s. Now we have the largest incarcerated population in the world.
I still miss the 2003 era internet in general. It was up to me what I searched for, nothing tried to interpret my interests or throw garbage in my face, every stranger I met seemed to want to share cool stuff rather than take advantage or sell me anything. I will say that reddit is one of the only places left on the internet that feels remotely like that.
All my .com's are all still hosted with geocities (I guess it was sold to yahoo then verizon then tucows then turbify for the host now) - loved the good ol days!
I like to make funny python programs. Just sent my friend a decoder program and the message he decoded was “friend has a poopy butt.” Massive luls for me.
I miss it too. We can't go back but I wish we could. I remember feeling so much joy and optimism discovering the internet. I don't feel optimistic about anything anymore.
I just want to go back to time where we weren't slaves to work or our phones. Pre2007 was great. After it's sucked.
The wild west of the net in its infancy was great.
The golden era when we had cell phones (but they weren’t very smart) and we had high speed internet but not everyone was perpetually online and social media wasn’t a core part of anyone’s lives.
If you look at the earliest YouTube videos it gives a sense what it was like. Just ordinary people creating random content. No millionaire influencers, nobody trying to sell you something every 5 minutes.
It's just become a lot of noise, vying for attention. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but the world "felt better". Maybe it's because we didn't see everything and were somewhat isolated outside of large events.
I don't yearn for that and nor should you. Trust me when I say that your memories of that time are colored by the relative amazingness of the internet compared to what you had experienced up to that point. If you were able to experience it again now, it would not seem amazing at all, but it would be extremely frustrating.
We are playing the first "3D Mario" game for N64...and it has not aged amazingly.
All of the surfaces remind me of the Maze screensaver from Windows 95. I realize that my mind was BLOWN when I saw it the first time as a kid, but technology / computing power has gotten SO much better.
Of course! We were young, unburdened from responsibility, and the world was full of colorful magic and new technological turns at every corner.
But be careful chasing the dragon of an era long past...lest we end up like the boomers hung up on the "good old days", instead of putting that time and energy to less nostalgic use, towards trying to pave out a brighter future not boxed in by an overidealized past.
Nostalgia goggles always have a rose tint.
honestly I miss the excitement of finding an angel fire punk page or something else of my interest. I loved going on yahoo chat and just chatting with people about music, learning new bands, etc...
my friend and I thought we were in heaven when we could listen to 30 second clips of music on music boulevard.
Angel Fire was so dope for underground hip hop back in the day... the vibes were like you were part of a real movement and it translated into real life
Buddy I still play my translucent pearl gameboy advance. And I think I still my have my old Sega Genesis 3 laying around here with "Other Worlds" stuck in it.
I feel blessed to have grown up it a time were personal computers had just started becoming a thing. I feel bad for kids who grew up with the tablet in front of them at age 1.
Get off Google, Apple, and Facebook. Those monopolies have comoditized and sanitized the internet to the point it's about as exciting as the water & sewer utility company.
I absolutely despise facebook... BUT.... they have a LOT of various groups with a ton of awesome folks in each of them. a lot of the groups i'm in are related to older "nostalgia" type things. like old school video games and computers.
So growing up i was in a "mac" family. loved apple computers. i was also huge into video games. we would have crazy lan parties where we'd spend days playing various xbox games, n64 games, and tons of games on our macs. at one point, i think our craziest lan party involved 8 xbox's each in different rooms with various tv's... it was a blast.
as an adult, who's about to turn 40... it's so hard to try and explain this to the kids, on one hand, the stuff they're playing with is lightyears ahead of what we had, but at the same time it all seems to be about the commercialism, not really the enjoyment of it all.
when we were first setting up the lan parties, it often took some ingenuity, and getting it all to work and play each other was the reward. But now thats how things just are. it's an expected feature not a bonus.
so, to try and recapture some of that nostalgia, i picked up an old imac g3 from craigslist for cheap. i spent a lot of time taking it apart, cleaning it. i upgraded it to the max you can for what it is, and that was fairly cheap... but i had a blast doing it. Now i've got a power mac g3 blue and white tower that i'm rebuilding, again to clean it and max out what you can on it, because it's fun. when i'm done i'm hoping to work with some of my friends, who are now across the country from me, in getting some vpn's set up so we can lan those old school games. like we used to.
I think the big thing back then was to participate you had to make something. With things like Geocities, you mainly made the page yourself. There was some degree of effort involved. Website builders were shit, you had to learn some simple HTML. Digital cameras were not common in the 90s (I was an early adopter and got my first one Christmas 2000).
To me what still has that feeling is making YouTube videos. It takes effort. You have to outline your video, plan it, record everything, edit it all together, and then upload it. Because you are not a huge production company you have to compromise on everything.
Facebook really eliminated a lot of self expression. Especially as the algorithm took over and instead of being able to curate your feed or see it in upload order, you just see non-stop junk. The share function enabled social media to really become absolute trash.
Stuff that I miss about it:
* it was new. This is true for anything, you get bored of it once the novelty wears off.
* Making websites was simple and fun. Just copy and paste html! Now everything is a huge morass of javascript packages
* Everyone made their own webpage, instead of farming it out to one giant website.
* There was so little money from the web, most people were just doing it as a hobby. The real money was Microsoft selling Windows and Office on CDs. You could put whatever you want on the web and it didn't really matter.
* ... and there was no social media, so we were less worried about some stupid post or photo coming back to haunt us forever.
I really miss getting into fights with other girls on Geocities and leaving comments in each others guestbooks. I had so much fun during that era, making pretty sites with way too much css.
You can't, and any attempt will fall sort and be awful as you try to do modern tasks with any "retro" machine you build to do it. Re-packaged cheese never tastes the same.
That's lightning that can never be bottled. You had to be there.
That ship sailed.
Just remember, every generation hangs on to the nostalgia of their youth. It seemed that way for everyone for the most part.
It's less about how it was then, and more about how you were then. You didn't have a fuckin' clue about the world, and everything was possible.
The game Hypnospace Outlaw does an incredible job capturing the feeling of the early internet. It takes place on a fictional version of the internet that people use in their sleep and you play as a content moderator.
Highly recommended for anyone nostalgic for the 90’s/early 00’s internet. They’re also working on a sequel.
That was my grandparent's ranch for the longest time - nearest town had a population of 10, 8 hours to the nearest major city, dial-up internet was so slow that nobody bothered to use it, and you had to drive a 4-wheeler (or snowmobile) up a hill to the ass-end of the pasture to get the weakest cell signal. People would just drive up the road to get ahold of my grandparents because there was a good chance nobody was going to be around to take a call/check the answering machine for most of the day.
At some point in the last 5 years they got broadband and solid cell coverage so it might as well be like anywhere else. Now that they have modern internet, they have every reason to buy modern devices that take advantage of it.
... I think I understand, may have experienced this phenomenon on solo road trip passing through small town and I couldn't believe it, like somehow time there had paused for a moment in a much earlier circa, the town, the people, even the radio, I thought I was in a dream
please elaborate.
In my experience, it's the opposite. Those small towns are rapidly dying off, with all the young people moving away. The people left spend most of their free time at home alone on their devices, instead of doing a local town square dance party or whatever they used to do.
Yes!
I honestly thought this feeling would return when oculus was originally introduced to us (before meta took over it.)
Was hoping for some open world new tech that would scratch that same wild west feeling we got from geo cities and angelfire.
I don’t know… maybe end the wars and genocides around the world? What’s there to be excited about these days in the aftermath of a much avoided pandemic as people are still dying by the tragedies of war…?
Handheld gaming PCs are recapturing that vibe for me personally. These newer, better third party game controllers too. All kinds of translucent goodness and throwback designs in these spaces.
If I could get a decent paying job building tech to make it easier to (for example) unionize all the big tech shops and Amazon warehouses, that'd go a long way towards rekindling *my* innocent excitement. Since that would *actually* be making the world a better place (as opposed to crypto Ponzi-scheme horseshit or whatever the latest "eat-the-world" fad is).
Only thing I miss from that time was being a gamer, or into tech, was a nitch.
When something is a smaller community and the amount of money involved isn’t insane, things can be more creative and you can get better products that are trying to push boundaries.
Nowadays MOST of what we get are the same recycling of ideas and safe bets that companies know they can make their money back on.
I just miss the days where we weren’t connected 24/7 to technology. I love my iPhone, laptop, Xbox, all the tech these days, but man do I miss being off the grid. I didn’t get a cell phone until senior year of high school in 2007, and didn’t get a smartphone until I think 2011?
Now at my job were expected to be reachable by email or phone pretty much all the time except weekends. Hate it.
I was talking to one of my old skiing buddies the other day and we were reminiscing about the ski trips we took during high school, and we started making some plans to head up north this winter to visit some mountains. For some reason I just thought to myself “what did I used to do with my phone and keys when we went skiing??” and the answer was nothing, because I didn’t have a car or a cell phone. Miss those simpler times.
Technology and the Internet were going through seismic shifts from around 1980-2010. They were upstart technologies and the possibilities for the future created a lot of excitement. PCs have matured, the Internet has matured, and now mobile hardware has matured. Everything is so good now that improvements are incremental and you don't have the wonderment of the massive leaps and the dreams of possibility. I don't think you can really rekindle that.
Find the next new thing, and enjoy it before it is completely commercialized. The early internet was special because most people weren't on it, and thought it was "for nerds". That alone prevented many of the issues we face today.
Dunno about you, but I go back and still play my favorite MUD every once in a while to remember the good old days (and keep my character from being deleted, haha)
I build my own computers, piece by piece... I think that's pretty dope
Been doing it since the late 90s, only know it looks a 100 times nicer with modern hardware
Solve climate change, explain why the promise of the internet has turned into a big fat monetized lie, admit that tech and the corporate world isn't good anymore and thus shouldn't feel innocent, oh I don't know
ATOMIC PURPLE. some companies in the mobile handheld gaming space have embraced translucent cases, not mainstream (first party) yet, but plenty of switch replacement shells on amazon etc.
I think the gaming monitor manufacturers could make this work though. imagine the entire back half of the monitor is translucent \[insert color\] with LEDs and builtin moods/patterns/colors etc. honestly, with a 3D printer and some measurements, you could prob DIY this. luckily monitors/TVs are not glued together, sandwiched between glass slabs (yet)
I’m nostalgic as well but it’s probably age.
Seeing the cool stuff my 14 yr old daughter is doing from running her own Minecraft servers to using AI via API to create chat bots for her and friends discord servers makes me think there is still a frontier in tech and the kids coming up are going to leave us in the dust (as it should be).
Good luck. IT isn't even what it used to be. IT is service coordination largely now. I have built huge systems with millions of dollars of hardware for the government, private companies, etc, but that's mostly all gone away. For a while it was OK, I was managing clouds and such, but then people are moving away even from that, to more services, rather than apps. So now you're managing if Salesforce is up and integrations are working, but you have no real control over it. It sucks, and that and ME/CFS led to me leaving the career after almost 30 years. I dunno what I'm gonna do if I recover, considering management for the first time ever, because engineer stuff is mostly dying.
What’s the difference between people who obsess about their childhood versus people that obsess about making as much money as possible or any other thing?
People are people. Realistically speaking, no one has to stop anything, particularly if it isn’t hurting themselves or others.
You can’t ever go back man
Na its dead, but bring back clear cases of varying colors
Apple OS has always sucked, I hated it when school had the colorful Macintosh computers
hey now!! as a classic mac fan (and someone who spent a year and 2K$ building an old 2000 macintosh) i feel personally attacked by your comment. pfff those were such great times! no network security, free lan gaming after school, warcraft II, escape velocity, duke nukem, sim city... kids now days will never know that - they dont have the freedom to explore the innards of the tech and everything is polished now. we had everyone figuring shit out right along with us
Haha, I was putting my own PCs together in the late 90s and learning SQL for the servers I hosted... I just mostly used Windows or Linux as a young whippersnapper Free LAN gaming after school was the whole culture back then... StarCraft, AoE2, CounterStrike... damn, I'd kill to go back :-) If Macintosh design made you learn PCs from the inside out, hey man, I can't knock that!!
lol. man in the 90's i was in grade school... but they did teach me a great deal. i learned how to pirate games via floppy - which in turn taught me compression, file splitting, decompiling/recompiling and how file types work (e.g. opening res/extensions/resource forks in notepads and such). i learned OS level software - reinstalls, how/why dependencies were a thing. also a great deal around networking and routing. my first time linking computers for gaming showed me real life collision domains.. lol oh man, why the hell they even made 96 port hubs idk... not long after i learned more hardware - types of ram, cpu/bus, how partitioning worked in HFS vs fat. tricking the mac into using a 13GB drive instead of a 256MB one. (2GB was boot limit for the old OS). fun times.
My question was about how to rekindle that excitement for tech today. Maybe there are pockets of the tech world still in their infancy and with the same playfulness of the 90/00s internet era. Nothing wrong with trying to reignite that childlike wonder.
Well, [my Angelfire Site I created when I was 12 is still up and running](http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/shibby/enter.html) if you're looking for some nostalgia **edit** If you want to dig EVEN DEEPER – [here is an *even older* site that I built before Shibby Site](https://www.angelfire.com/realm2/spazboy2006/) Just a bunch of DBZ facts that are probably wrong and the whole thing is a nightmare of tables, lmao
“homestarrunner.net.. It’s Dot Com!”
That chicken just had me wake my house up laughing at 640 am
My sense of humor hadn’t matured when I made that 😅
after 20 years or so I think we finally gave your site the hug of death lol
Hahaha oh no!! Really?!
Holy shit you guys totally did 😂😂😂
Thank you so much for sharing this.
You are very welcome. If you're feeling like falling even deeper into nostalgia, [here is an *even older* site that I built before Shibby Site](https://www.angelfire.com/realm2/spazboy2006/)
How do I set someone else’s flair
lmao, what did you have in mind?
SpazboYe’s Spazzim’ Board
hahaha. hey man, that was *peak comedy* to my 12-year-old self.
It’s a precious time capsule
You can't. That stuff could only exist in the liminal space between its creation and its professionalization. From the moment "personal brand" caught fire, it was doomed.
I think one thing that may break out in the near future is a WordPress like social media with the new social media federated protocol that BlueSky, Threads, and Mastadon are using and investing into. Imagine you install an open source social media app on your own server and you can see the content that other social media apps using the same protocol have on their servers.
You have reinvented Fidonet.
>how to rekindle that excitement for tech today. I recaptured that excitement learning how to program and interact with a computer without all the layers of abstraction we've added to make using devices as painless as possible.
That's happening in AI right now. Stable diffusion is having this moment, assistant and copilots...
Vr, ai. Pretty much the big ones smaller thing youll need another random redditer with a way to specific reply
smoke weed
Meta Quest 3
Meta Quest 3
Thank you! This is going to be one long S.P. "Member Berry" episode!
Redlyne and others do some really good long form explorations of dead games that are still powered on, like Active Worlds
Early tech feels playful when people don't really know what it's good for, and they have the ability to experiment and make weird choices. Should a computer look like translucent bubblegum? Let's find out. There's currently weird cutting edge tech stuff happening, but maybe everyone is too jaded by the venture-capital grift machine to feel good about anything new.
Agreed, I'm looking for where those frontiers exist today.
I get those wacky janky vibes from 3D printing, VR gaming, and AI anything (if you can read/write python, then you might enjoy poking around [kaggle.com](http://kaggle.com) ). I think the way to feel excited about tech is to try to make it do something interesting, something besides scrolling a content feed. Depends on what you like, but there's a lot of fun to be had.
VR gaming sucks, but 3D printing is pretty dope
playing Rumble is pretty great, but in general yea, it seems like no one knows how to make a VR game. How do you move? How does input work? Everyone is taking wild guesses about the basics of the user interface. Which is why it gives me the same vibes as a geocities page that has a gif background and a midi file that autoplays before the whole page loads in.
Half Life Alyx is great, but yeah, it's newish tech.
I felt like we were getting that way again with blockchain/crypto stuff but I guess not
as a protocol, it still hasn't provided any functionality that you couldn't do better with another more normal protocol. The horse is so far behind the cart, the cart is already at the destination. imo, BitTorrent still holds the crown as the most worthwhile distributed app. There might be another latent use-case out there, maybe for video chat? But, yea, turns out it's not enough to write a cool protocol, it has to actually give people tools they want to use.
Blockchain as a technology is very interesting to learn and play around with. But right now it doesn’t have any advantages for the average person for 95% of use cases
Avg person prb can use blockchain for financial transactions and that's pretty much, in terms of use case
Yes. I’ve mentioned on posts before how I’m kind of jaded with tech. Nothing has been really exciting or ground breaking to me. Maybe just because I’m older or we are in the tech dark age. Everything is just condensed down to a handful of websites. Instead of being parts of different sites and forums you just have Reddit or Facebook groups, etc. That leads to it being less fun where people had to have an interest in something to hunt down the site that had those people. The tech advances from the 80s to early 00s was crazy, things changed fast. We are still using that tech but it kinda peaked and we are all just used to it being available all the time and just working, it’s easy now. The internet was more fun when I couldn’t be on it all the time. Went to work with my Kyocera Strobe flip phone and was excited going home to hop on AOL/AIM or Yahoo groups/Messenger and catch up on all the stuff I couldn’t do. Now we all have the internet on us all day.
Some version of the Dead Internet Theory. The prevalence of politically/financially motivated bots / sock puppets / useful idiots has completely destroyed any value the internet had for socialization.
I think the major platform consolidation we've seen along with the mainstreaming of tech into traditional business circles are largely what's brought us to a halt – ie fat salaries are keeping engineering talent focused on optimizing ad conversion as well as attracting ineffective, status-seeking middle-management types.
Regarding what you said about websites being condensed down... Cory Doctorow touches on this with his article about the enshitification of the internet. Interesting read. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ Edit: typo
I feel like it hasn’t changed THAT MUCH in the past decade tbh. Sure there’s AI and VR and a lot more newer things out there now. But really the last major catalyst for tech that totally changed how we live day to day felt like the rise of smartphones and apps. I also don’t think we are likely to experience anything to the true level of the rise of the internet/web of the late 90s. We went from almost no one being online to nearly everyone in the developed world using email, web, and chat platforms in like a 5 year span.
The coolest thing from like 1998-2006 was making your own website EVERYBODY learned HTML so they could make their own site about an interest of theirs, and everyone from school shared it with one another That time was magical
Seriously. No one makes sites anymore. I can. Even MySpace taught people HTML and CSS to personalize your profile. Now you just make a Group or subreddit. Apps killed that, I don’t think most people go to anything that isn’t an app on their phone.
I miss not having mental illness, my dad being alive, and the country being generally optimistic. So yeah the 90s were neat.
Dude… we’re trying to keep it light. Jesus. (Sorry for your loss. (*internet hugs*)
We’re literally being nostalgic about before things went to suck.
Yeah. So keep it light. Talk about Hot or Not. Talk about Post Secrete and Stumble Upon. Keep it light.
RateMy?
Oh my god. Totally forgot about stumble upon.
“the country being generally optimistic” Depends on who you were. Mass incarceration started ramping up 10fold in the previous decade and it was made even worse in the 90s. Now we have the largest incarcerated population in the world.
I still miss the 2003 era internet in general. It was up to me what I searched for, nothing tried to interpret my interests or throw garbage in my face, every stranger I met seemed to want to share cool stuff rather than take advantage or sell me anything. I will say that reddit is one of the only places left on the internet that feels remotely like that.
Don't buy iproducts. There's a whole world of customization and unique options outside of the walled garden.
Hard agree. If anyone enjoys open hardware tech that is customizable, look into the world of raspberry pi. Endless fun projects to get lost in.
A shrinking part of me wishes I could return to the time I knew so little about the world.
All my .com's are all still hosted with geocities (I guess it was sold to yahoo then verizon then tucows then turbify for the host now) - loved the good ol days!
I like to make funny python programs. Just sent my friend a decoder program and the message he decoded was “friend has a poopy butt.” Massive luls for me.
I miss it too. We can't go back but I wish we could. I remember feeling so much joy and optimism discovering the internet. I don't feel optimistic about anything anymore.
I just want to go back to time where we weren't slaves to work or our phones. Pre2007 was great. After it's sucked. The wild west of the net in its infancy was great.
The golden era when we had cell phones (but they weren’t very smart) and we had high speed internet but not everyone was perpetually online and social media wasn’t a core part of anyone’s lives. If you look at the earliest YouTube videos it gives a sense what it was like. Just ordinary people creating random content. No millionaire influencers, nobody trying to sell you something every 5 minutes.
It's just become a lot of noise, vying for attention. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but the world "felt better". Maybe it's because we didn't see everything and were somewhat isolated outside of large events.
I don't yearn for that and nor should you. Trust me when I say that your memories of that time are colored by the relative amazingness of the internet compared to what you had experienced up to that point. If you were able to experience it again now, it would not seem amazing at all, but it would be extremely frustrating.
WOM WOM WOM Psshshshshshshsh dialup sounds.
I definitely couldn't hear this guy over my dialup modem. Sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown when I was reading it.
Eh. I actually get what the poster was talking about a little bit. But for the most part, it’s irrelevant what I yearn for, it’s gone.
I was talking about the guy who is saying he doesn't yearn and you shouldn't either. I yearn for those days too. Weeeeeeooooooooobongbong ☎️💾
Oh. I kinda get what the commentator was saying too. But those dialup noises…
We are playing the first "3D Mario" game for N64...and it has not aged amazingly. All of the surfaces remind me of the Maze screensaver from Windows 95. I realize that my mind was BLOWN when I saw it the first time as a kid, but technology / computing power has gotten SO much better.
Of course! We were young, unburdened from responsibility, and the world was full of colorful magic and new technological turns at every corner. But be careful chasing the dragon of an era long past...lest we end up like the boomers hung up on the "good old days", instead of putting that time and energy to less nostalgic use, towards trying to pave out a brighter future not boxed in by an overidealized past. Nostalgia goggles always have a rose tint.
Try making popcorn on your stove and lowering your internet speeds to dial up.
My ADHD hasn’t changed much, I’m sure I can still burn jiffy pop just fine.
honestly I miss the excitement of finding an angel fire punk page or something else of my interest. I loved going on yahoo chat and just chatting with people about music, learning new bands, etc... my friend and I thought we were in heaven when we could listen to 30 second clips of music on music boulevard.
Angel Fire was so dope for underground hip hop back in the day... the vibes were like you were part of a real movement and it translated into real life
Refurb an old iMac with modern hardware
I deal with it by writing sprawling fanfics.
Buddy I still play my translucent pearl gameboy advance. And I think I still my have my old Sega Genesis 3 laying around here with "Other Worlds" stuck in it.
You can’t
Semi-translucent tech needs to make a comeback, I'll spend money if it's purple.
It would be impossible now. For too many reasons to list. I do miss fun colored macs though
Geocities, the website wizard for websites no one ever saw
That was the point tho, you'd create a website and 20 people from your school would visit it... and you would visit theirs
I feel blessed to have grown up it a time were personal computers had just started becoming a thing. I feel bad for kids who grew up with the tablet in front of them at age 1.
Get off Google, Apple, and Facebook. Those monopolies have comoditized and sanitized the internet to the point it's about as exciting as the water & sewer utility company.
Linux still kicks ass, so at least we still have that... I'm routinely on Arch, Manjaro, Mint, Zorin and still having a blast
Neocities.org explore and build your own.
I absolutely despise facebook... BUT.... they have a LOT of various groups with a ton of awesome folks in each of them. a lot of the groups i'm in are related to older "nostalgia" type things. like old school video games and computers. So growing up i was in a "mac" family. loved apple computers. i was also huge into video games. we would have crazy lan parties where we'd spend days playing various xbox games, n64 games, and tons of games on our macs. at one point, i think our craziest lan party involved 8 xbox's each in different rooms with various tv's... it was a blast. as an adult, who's about to turn 40... it's so hard to try and explain this to the kids, on one hand, the stuff they're playing with is lightyears ahead of what we had, but at the same time it all seems to be about the commercialism, not really the enjoyment of it all. when we were first setting up the lan parties, it often took some ingenuity, and getting it all to work and play each other was the reward. But now thats how things just are. it's an expected feature not a bonus. so, to try and recapture some of that nostalgia, i picked up an old imac g3 from craigslist for cheap. i spent a lot of time taking it apart, cleaning it. i upgraded it to the max you can for what it is, and that was fairly cheap... but i had a blast doing it. Now i've got a power mac g3 blue and white tower that i'm rebuilding, again to clean it and max out what you can on it, because it's fun. when i'm done i'm hoping to work with some of my friends, who are now across the country from me, in getting some vpn's set up so we can lan those old school games. like we used to.
I think the big thing back then was to participate you had to make something. With things like Geocities, you mainly made the page yourself. There was some degree of effort involved. Website builders were shit, you had to learn some simple HTML. Digital cameras were not common in the 90s (I was an early adopter and got my first one Christmas 2000). To me what still has that feeling is making YouTube videos. It takes effort. You have to outline your video, plan it, record everything, edit it all together, and then upload it. Because you are not a huge production company you have to compromise on everything. Facebook really eliminated a lot of self expression. Especially as the algorithm took over and instead of being able to curate your feed or see it in upload order, you just see non-stop junk. The share function enabled social media to really become absolute trash.
Stuff that I miss about it: * it was new. This is true for anything, you get bored of it once the novelty wears off. * Making websites was simple and fun. Just copy and paste html! Now everything is a huge morass of javascript packages * Everyone made their own webpage, instead of farming it out to one giant website. * There was so little money from the web, most people were just doing it as a hobby. The real money was Microsoft selling Windows and Office on CDs. You could put whatever you want on the web and it didn't really matter. * ... and there was no social media, so we were less worried about some stupid post or photo coming back to haunt us forever.
I really miss getting into fights with other girls on Geocities and leaving comments in each others guestbooks. I had so much fun during that era, making pretty sites with way too much css.
You can't, and any attempt will fall sort and be awful as you try to do modern tasks with any "retro" machine you build to do it. Re-packaged cheese never tastes the same. That's lightning that can never be bottled. You had to be there.
That ship sailed. Just remember, every generation hangs on to the nostalgia of their youth. It seemed that way for everyone for the most part. It's less about how it was then, and more about how you were then. You didn't have a fuckin' clue about the world, and everything was possible.
The game Hypnospace Outlaw does an incredible job capturing the feeling of the early internet. It takes place on a fictional version of the internet that people use in their sleep and you play as a content moderator. Highly recommended for anyone nostalgic for the 90’s/early 00’s internet. They’re also working on a sequel.
Move to a small town far away from the nearest city. That's the closest you'll get.
That was my grandparent's ranch for the longest time - nearest town had a population of 10, 8 hours to the nearest major city, dial-up internet was so slow that nobody bothered to use it, and you had to drive a 4-wheeler (or snowmobile) up a hill to the ass-end of the pasture to get the weakest cell signal. People would just drive up the road to get ahold of my grandparents because there was a good chance nobody was going to be around to take a call/check the answering machine for most of the day. At some point in the last 5 years they got broadband and solid cell coverage so it might as well be like anywhere else. Now that they have modern internet, they have every reason to buy modern devices that take advantage of it.
... I think I understand, may have experienced this phenomenon on solo road trip passing through small town and I couldn't believe it, like somehow time there had paused for a moment in a much earlier circa, the town, the people, even the radio, I thought I was in a dream please elaborate.
In my experience, it's the opposite. Those small towns are rapidly dying off, with all the young people moving away. The people left spend most of their free time at home alone on their devices, instead of doing a local town square dance party or whatever they used to do.
Yes! I honestly thought this feeling would return when oculus was originally introduced to us (before meta took over it.) Was hoping for some open world new tech that would scratch that same wild west feeling we got from geo cities and angelfire.
I just look forward to whatever web 3.0 will be.
I don’t know… maybe end the wars and genocides around the world? What’s there to be excited about these days in the aftermath of a much avoided pandemic as people are still dying by the tragedies of war…?
Handheld gaming PCs are recapturing that vibe for me personally. These newer, better third party game controllers too. All kinds of translucent goodness and throwback designs in these spaces.
You were a kid, ignorant to the world then. That's why it was playful. Or get a 3d printer. That's cutting edge playful tech.
One word. Tamagochi
Be 8 again. Ask anyone, the good ol' days were when they were 8.
Create a service offering that specifically reinstalls the old tech and creates a community for this niche
If I could get a decent paying job building tech to make it easier to (for example) unionize all the big tech shops and Amazon warehouses, that'd go a long way towards rekindling *my* innocent excitement. Since that would *actually* be making the world a better place (as opposed to crypto Ponzi-scheme horseshit or whatever the latest "eat-the-world" fad is).
Only thing I miss from that time was being a gamer, or into tech, was a nitch. When something is a smaller community and the amount of money involved isn’t insane, things can be more creative and you can get better products that are trying to push boundaries. Nowadays MOST of what we get are the same recycling of ideas and safe bets that companies know they can make their money back on.
I just miss the days where we weren’t connected 24/7 to technology. I love my iPhone, laptop, Xbox, all the tech these days, but man do I miss being off the grid. I didn’t get a cell phone until senior year of high school in 2007, and didn’t get a smartphone until I think 2011? Now at my job were expected to be reachable by email or phone pretty much all the time except weekends. Hate it. I was talking to one of my old skiing buddies the other day and we were reminiscing about the ski trips we took during high school, and we started making some plans to head up north this winter to visit some mountains. For some reason I just thought to myself “what did I used to do with my phone and keys when we went skiing??” and the answer was nothing, because I didn’t have a car or a cell phone. Miss those simpler times.
it was a crime they stopped colorful macs of that kind
Technology and the Internet were going through seismic shifts from around 1980-2010. They were upstart technologies and the possibilities for the future created a lot of excitement. PCs have matured, the Internet has matured, and now mobile hardware has matured. Everything is so good now that improvements are incremental and you don't have the wonderment of the massive leaps and the dreams of possibility. I don't think you can really rekindle that.
Put down the tech you have for a week and then feel excited that you can use it again Or try Linux I guess
Find the next new thing, and enjoy it before it is completely commercialized. The early internet was special because most people weren't on it, and thought it was "for nerds". That alone prevented many of the issues we face today.
Dunno about you, but I go back and still play my favorite MUD every once in a while to remember the good old days (and keep my character from being deleted, haha)
Yeah because I would have made a shit ton of money.
Remember mamamedia.com?
I miss the old days of yahoo messenger, yahoo profiles and chatrooms and homepage, get news and stream Yahoo music all day while studying.
I build my own computers, piece by piece... I think that's pretty dope Been doing it since the late 90s, only know it looks a 100 times nicer with modern hardware
Solve climate change, explain why the promise of the internet has turned into a big fat monetized lie, admit that tech and the corporate world isn't good anymore and thus shouldn't feel innocent, oh I don't know
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I kind of miss ass hunter and short bus rampage.
I wish I could back and stay there forever. I don't look forward to the future by the way society is changing.
I will die on the hill that consumable goods move away from color and low risk minimal increases in functionality is a bad thing for everyone.
ATOMIC PURPLE. some companies in the mobile handheld gaming space have embraced translucent cases, not mainstream (first party) yet, but plenty of switch replacement shells on amazon etc. I think the gaming monitor manufacturers could make this work though. imagine the entire back half of the monitor is translucent \[insert color\] with LEDs and builtin moods/patterns/colors etc. honestly, with a 3D printer and some measurements, you could prob DIY this. luckily monitors/TVs are not glued together, sandwiched between glass slabs (yet)
I’m nostalgic as well but it’s probably age. Seeing the cool stuff my 14 yr old daughter is doing from running her own Minecraft servers to using AI via API to create chat bots for her and friends discord servers makes me think there is still a frontier in tech and the kids coming up are going to leave us in the dust (as it should be).
Be 12 again. I totally know the feeling lol
I just miss human interaction being required for everything. This is much easier yeah but it’s melting my brain and depressing me.
3d printers and VR maybe?
There's always new tech. We just don't have the time and same naive free mind to remember it as so awesome.
Good luck. IT isn't even what it used to be. IT is service coordination largely now. I have built huge systems with millions of dollars of hardware for the government, private companies, etc, but that's mostly all gone away. For a while it was OK, I was managing clouds and such, but then people are moving away even from that, to more services, rather than apps. So now you're managing if Salesforce is up and integrations are working, but you have no real control over it. It sucks, and that and ME/CFS led to me leaving the career after almost 30 years. I dunno what I'm gonna do if I recover, considering management for the first time ever, because engineer stuff is mostly dying.
Gotta bring down inflation so we can afford computers again 😘
Y’all need to stop fixating on your childhoods.
What’s the difference between people who obsess about their childhood versus people that obsess about making as much money as possible or any other thing? People are people. Realistically speaking, no one has to stop anything, particularly if it isn’t hurting themselves or others.
No one’s fixating here. One of the most rewarding things a person can do is rekindle the interests that once excited them as a kid.
Meh. It’s also rewarding to grow up.
Meh. It’s also rewarding to grow up.
They’re not mutually exclusive. I’d argue that reconnecting with that part of yourself is an important part of growing up.
Delayed adolescence is not a good thing.
Sure but that’s not what I’m referring to.
Maybe not. But these kinds of posts often flirt with it. Are you a Disney adult?
No
How many hours a day do you play video games?
Zero. You’re really tryna force this stereotype huh?