Because back then the internet wasn't as mainstream and you needed to know how a computer worked before you could get back on and when everything needed a separate irq,even any modem you were gonna install on a computer needed a irq that wasn't the same otherwise it would brick the computer.

...ok

Mairo said:
...ok

Huh?

Axelthefox said:
Huh?

What is the point of this statement?
Computers were differend in the 90's, what's the discussion you are initializing?

Mairo said:
What is the point of this statement?
Computers were differend in the 90's, what's the discussion you are initializing?

nvm then.

U can lock.

…. have the titles of forums been altered for giggles recently?

Versperus said:
…. have the titles of forums been altered for giggles recently?

Nope. I edited the post dude, cause the janitor guy asked about the point of the thread and i told him to plz lock the thread.

Ummmm... ?? >_>

Not really. I had dial-up.

I'm actually pretty glad I don't need to know how a computer works to be able to talk to people online

Well, if you find a 28.8 kbps speed good, then it's fine by you.

I only experienced high-speed internet in 2010.

You can still get the experience of an exclusive club by hanging out in the IRC chatroom of that mountain climbing game or by just using IRC in general.

I wasn't on the internet in the 90s, but I do remember the early 00s. The internet was a very different place before everyone was herded into massive social media websites.

There are times when I do miss browsing dozens of Forums, each dedicated to a particular hobby or interest. The rise of Facebook and Twitter radically transformed the way people use the internet.

Volphied said:
I wasn't on the internet in the 90s, but I do remember the early 00s. The internet was a very different place before everyone was herded into massive social media websites.

There are times when I do miss browsing dozens of Forums, each dedicated to a particular hobby or interest. The rise of Facebook and Twitter radically transformed the way people use the internet.

I remember that too. I wonder if anyone remembers that Legend of zelda song from napster that was supposedly labeled as being from system of a down,when the singer didn't even sound like Serj, and i wondered too about the songs being labeled as being from Matchbox 20.

I barely existed in the 90's

Ah, the Nineties. When the world wide web was nothing more than a bunch of basic text documents. Maybe a gif here and there. Amazing, engaging content that could soak up your time for hours. Because you were waiting 50 minutes for one web page to load up. God forbid if you wanted to actually fap at something higher quality than a highly compressed postage stamp in quicktime player. But then again people actually went outside in those times. Not to mention it will all come to an end as soon as your mother gets on the phone for 40 minutes.

Also, plenty of retards and computer illiterate were surfing the web in the 90's. You just needed to know how to install a modem (if your computer somehow didn't come with one)- which is pretty easy, and sign up with an isp. which is only slightly easier today since you don't need to look in the phonebook anymore. Not to mention there was this big ISP designed exclusively for normies- America Online- AKA AOL - That sent out like a billion CD's. You definitely didn't need to know computers to get on the internet back then.

Leon_Neon said:
Ah, the Nineties. When the world wide web was nothing more than a bunch of basic text documents. Maybe a gif here and there. Amazing, engaging content that could soak up your time for hours. Because you were waiting 50 minutes for one web page to load up. God forbid if you wanted to actually fap at something higher quality than a highly compressed postage stamp in quicktime player. But then again people actually went outside in those times. Not to mention it will all come to an end as soon as your mother gets on the phone for 40 minutes.

Also, plenty of retards and computer illiterate were surfing the web in the 90's. You just needed to know how to install a modem (if your computer somehow didn't come with one)- which is pretty easy, and sign up with an isp. which is only slightly easier today since you don't need to look in the phonebook anymore. Not to mention there was this big ISP designed exclusively for normies- America Online- AKA AOL - That sent out like a billion CD's. You definitely didn't need to know computers to get on the internet back then.

Just say the magic words already.

Lance_Armstrong said:
Just say the magic words already.

Le Septembre Éternel

----

Speaking of telephones, I think of the the '90s as the time where telephones were a novelty and you can sing "Hello, My Baby! Hello, My Honey!" to your honey, electricity was starting to light up the cities with those golden incandescent lamps, cameras were portable now thanks to Eastman-Kodak, when those horseless carriages started to cross the streets (though they were still for the upper crusts), where indoor plumbing was the craze, where the guys wore blazers and straw hats, and the girls wore pompadours and blouses with poofy sleeves and rode bicycles whose ankles popped a lot of monocles, where the new aesthetics were au naturelle and curvy, William Randolph Hearst was running the presses, New York was being littered with immigrants from Eastern Europe, and America just yoinked the last of Spain's territories.

You can say the '90s were A Beautiful Time.

Ugh, some of these responses.

I don't think the internet was better, but there are some things I miss.

For one thing, I think people were better adjusted socially in the 90s. We could get on the internet and have an intelligent conversation, versus the social media fecal flinging of today.

Then, when we got offline, we were actually offline. We went back to real lives and real friends that were separate from the internet, and the Worldwide Web was some place we visited but didn't live.

Privacy didn't feel like as much of an issue. Most of us didn't worry about private, unregulated data aggregators being able to create massive profiles on people or connect AI with facial recognition software.

People were more focused.

Yes, things took longer, but with the experience of 25 years since, I've started to realize that taking longer isn't such a bad thing.

CCoyote said:
Ugh, some of these responses.

I don't think the internet was better, but there are some things I miss.

For one thing, I think people were better adjusted socially in the 90s. We could get on the internet and have an intelligent conversation, versus the social media fecal flinging of today.

Then, when we got offline, we were actually offline. We went back to real lives and real friends that were separate from the internet, and the Worldwide Web was some place we visited but didn't live.

Privacy didn't feel like as much of an issue. Most of us didn't worry about private, unregulated data aggregators being able to create massive profiles on people or connect AI with facial recognition software.

People were more focused.

Yes, things took longer, but with the experience of 25 years since, I've started to realize that taking longer isn't such a bad thing.

Yup. I remember back then there was real privacy and the internet back then was like the wild west, where if you went anywhere. People wouldn't know who you are, but now companies mock you with their no right to privacy rules. And i remember back then it was considered bad form to use your real name on the internet, but all of a sudden, it is now considered untrustworthy to not use your real name.

The fact that the internet of yore was unregulated is a large part of why the privacy issues of today exist.

Anonymity is fine and has it's place, but with the trend being towards social media and the interactions wherein the person behind a text is just as important as what they have to say. In image boards or Usenet groups the person behind is usually irrelevant, not so much if you're trying to find local people or groups.

CCoyote said:
For one thing, I think people were better adjusted socially in the 90s. We could get on the internet and have an intelligent conversation, versus the social media fecal flinging of today.

Pretty sure this part at least is mostly due to perception. People have been assholes as long as humanity has existed, it's just that the pool of people capable of hanging out on the internet went from people with consistently higher education (IT students in old fields, professors of the same, and IT enthusiasts) to include more and more of the broader population, which ultimately also includes younger people, uneducated, and people with interests completely opposite of IT or anything to do with it.

CCoyote said:
Ugh, some of these responses.

I don't think the internet was better, but there are some things I miss.

For one thing, I think people were better adjusted socially in the 90s. We could get on the internet and have an intelligent conversation, versus the social media fecal flinging of today.

Then, when we got offline, we were actually offline. We went back to real lives and real friends that were separate from the internet, and the Worldwide Web was some place we visited but didn't live.

Privacy didn't feel like as much of an issue. Most of us didn't worry about private, unregulated data aggregators being able to create massive profiles on people or connect AI with facial recognition software.

People were more focused.

Yes, things took longer, but with the experience of 25 years since, I've started to realize that taking longer isn't such a bad thing.

I sure do miss GeoCities.

CCoyote said:

I don't think the internet was better...

...Yes, things took longer, but with the experience of 25 years since, I've started to realize that taking longer isn't such a bad thing.

Make up your mind

NotMeNotYou said:

Pretty sure this part at least is mostly due to perception. People have been assholes as long as humanity has existed, it's just that the pool of people capable of hanging out on the internet went from people with consistently higher education (IT students in old fields, professors of the same, and IT enthusiasts) to include more and more of the broader population, which ultimately also includes younger people, uneducated, and people with interests completely opposite of IT or anything to do with it.

There were tens of millions of people on the internet in the 90's and by the end of the 90's there were hundreds of millions. I highly doubt most of them were turbo nerds.

Also there were plenty of shit flinging back then, it just seems like there was none back then because you can shit fling on the potty now with your $900 plastic rectangle. Oh, and like coyote said, no one goes outside anymore.

Leon_Neon said:
Make up your mind

As they said (and you clipped out), "I don't think the internet was better, but there are some things I miss." You can think there were good things about something of the past, while in the present those things are missing but the overall situation is better. And vice-versa too. You can think the internet of the past was overall better, while the modern internet has good stuff that the past lacked. It's called a nuanced opinion.

There were tens of millions of people on the internet in the 90's and by the end of the 90's there were hundreds of millions. I highly doubt most of them were turbo nerds.

Surely not since the proliferation of AOL and similar services of broad appeal. But relatively speaking, the internet had a higher percentage of better educated people in the past.

Also there were plenty of shit flinging back then, it just seems like there was none back then because you can shit fling on the potty now with your $900 plastic rectangle. Oh, and like coyote said, no one goes outside anymore.

It helps too that places people visited tended to be for particular subjects and hobbies, so when people interacted it was over common interests. Sure there was shit-flinging, as mentioned people have been assholes since the dawn of time, and no one's saying it was a perfect utopia. But compare that to today, where interaction is done through the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, people with more disparate interests are more likely to run into each other, and that lack of commonality results in increased friction.

Leon_Neon said:
Make up your mind

I didn't contradict myself. Your curtness sounds like you're trying to stir up trouble.

Watsit said:
As they said (and you clipped out), "I don't think the internet was better, but there are some things I miss." You can think there were good things about something of the past, while in the present those things are missing but the overall situation is better. And vice-versa too. You can think the internet of the past was overall better, while the modern internet has good stuff that the past lacked. It's called a nuanced opinion.

Thank you.

I remember the 2000's internet and it was better before Facebook, in the mid 2010's i wanted a facebook account but then i thought it was a bad idea, then that thought got fueled by Richard Stallman. Later i thought it was just me fearing the change but i read this thread and now i know it is not just nostalgia or fear of change. By the way, in the early 2010's i used to watch memes at http://desmotivaciones.es/ and read funny stuff at the now defunct https://www.frikipedia.es/ in the mid 2010's .

If ypu miss the "close knit" communities, you have discord for that nowadays. In technical and functional respect the 90s net is a homo erectus to 20s homo sapiens xp

Tho i think that social media as is atm (monopolised, bloated and dgaf about privacy) is a plague and needs to be vanquished asap.

I miss when JavaScript wasn't a thing (or wasn't a fucking mandatory thing) and when websites looked like Maddox's website, or Ethan's "Toasty Tech" website.

or hell, the old Yahoo! GeoCities pages.

Back when websites were sparsely styled, little to no CSS, and no horrendous <div> spam everywhere...

It's worse now that people think "standalone app" means "hardcoded chrome running cached HTML/CSS/JavaScript" bullshit!

The good old days where websites were lightweight and didn't waste a ton of CPU time on superfluous bullshit.

KynikossDragonn said:
The good old days where websites were lightweight and didn't waste a ton of CPU time on superfluous bullshit.

Mind, this was at least in part because available RAM and processing capability didn't fucking allow it. XD

CCoyote said:
Mind, this was at least in part because available RAM and processing capability didn't fucking allow it. XD

Just because we have more RAM and CPU throughput doesn't mean you need to get lazy and take it for granted...

KynikossDragonn said:
Just because we have more RAM and CPU throughput doesn't mean you need to get lazy and take it for granted...

Oh, I agree! Back in the nineties, though, you couldn't be lazy with your coding. Sometimes, you almost had to search for the most efficient way of getting something done. It was almost a game.

Now, you've got companies trying to make fewer coders do more work in the name of productivity. Laziness is a luxury I think some of them have to take just to make the deadline. Not to mention the ones who just don't really know more efficient techniques.

CCoyote said:
Oh, I agree! Back in the nineties, though, you couldn't be lazy with your coding. Sometimes, you almost had to search for the most efficient way of getting something done. It was almost a game.

Now, you've got companies trying to make fewer coders do more work in the name of productivity. Laziness is a luxury I think some of them have to take just to make the deadline. Not to mention the ones who just don't really know more efficient techniques.

This is what I will agree with.

It's almost a rat race on who can be the laziest. You will not need to go further than the current state of the video gaming industry to see it.

I think it the fault of capitalism in general, hell most of your complaints are just results of capitalist putting a huge priority on the bottom line, only backing out when the fire under their ass gets hot enough to notice, and its easy to put out.

If developers would optimize their programs, we would realize that we don't need so much computer power, and we would still be using a lot older computer systems. But that would go against planned obsolescence.

I can't sit here on my high horse and say everything that has changed for the better, even though nostalgia chasing annoys me a bit.

KynikossDragonn said:
Just because we have more RAM and CPU throughput doesn't mean you need to get lazy and take it for granted...

It's not us you have to say that to.

Leon_Neon said:
If developers would optimize their programs, we would realize that we don't need so much computer power, and we would still be using a lot older computer systems. But that would go against planned obsolescence.

I disagree with the implication that planned obsolesence is the actual reason, particularly given that 'lack of optimization' still applies in open source where there is often not an obvious commercial motive.

Rather, almost everything in software is, when you assess it with some detachment, a temporary bodge which is probably going to be replaced as soon as something better comes along. To some degree this is a direct consequence of the increasing ease of software development.

If you agree with that premise, then there is a perfectly ordinary answer to the lack of optimization: "It doesn't make sense to optimize something until we know it's going to stick around. It makes it vastly more difficult to modify or swap out, it's likely to represent a serious time investment, and there's no guarantee it will make a meaningful difference to real world efficiency". All of those apply equally well to pet projects and corporate projects, as far as I know.

(conversely, actually mature software technologies like Unix pipes and sockets do tend to get optimized, as well as things that look like they're gonna really last (JSON, XML) or things that people perceive as a hammer for every nail (uh.. JSON, XML ;))
)

savageorange said:
I disagree with the implication that planned obsolesence is the actual reason, particularly given that 'lack of optimization' still applies in open source where there is often not an obvious commercial motive.

I understood everything in Leon's reply to be a troll.

Although I expect some specific devices suffer from planned obsolescence (such as cellphones), it's obviously wrongheaded to apply that to all computing, everywhere. We didn't go from 1.023MHz 6502 processors in our Apple IIs and Commodore 64s to 5GHz x86-64 processors in our modern top-tier PCs because of planned obsolescence. I doubt very much whether Leon was even alive to remember the day when you could watch a 320x240 display being painted by software, because it actually took time and there was really only enough cycles to draw a 20x20 square of pixels in a single frame.

And I will totally fight anyone who says that video game developers, of all people, are lazy. Them's practically fighting words to me.

So... yeah.

I think most modern web pages are full of complex animations and and other stuff because web developers try to compensate the laziness of the writers. Social media and forums do so to attract more users, even though lots of animations and complex graphics make user interfaces slower to use.

Se also:
Our graphics will suck in the future