While I grew up with computers, when Internet got to the first homes like mine, I was still too young and had only very limited programming skills to contribute to it.
Love these stories about how simple and straight-forward it was to have a huge impact. I guess there is some nostalgia involved, but these were, in my opinion, better times.
I remember asking myself that same question at age 14, in 1978. It seemed like all the cool stuff had already been done by giants.
There I was using a flakey homebrew S-100 personal computer at home and single-user networked computer (lisp machine) at MIT (no, I was not a student at 14!) that could connect over the ARPAnet to all sorts of other hosts. Ahead of me was the PC revolution, Internet revolution, mobile revolution and others. I couldn't see any of it.
But over the years I got to work on the plumbing of all sorts of crazy developments, some influential, some not, all of them really fascinating. And some of the stuff I worked on in the mid-late 1980s is just now starting to come to fruition.
I think the two keys are in what Ylonen writes about ssh: 1> he just did it, and was not afraid to do things like ask for a port assignment and 2> he announced his work. Funny, he did it on cypherpunks@toad.net -- run by my business partner John Gilmore; the cypherpunks used to meet in our offices at Cygnus. I remember we switched to ssh basically immediately.
Someone else responded that all the interesting stuff starts out small by definition. That's very true, but doesn't mean there isn't room to grow. Some interesting things come in later. For example YouTube: seems stupid to me, since if you wanted video you could always put it on your site, where it would be connected with other relevant stuff. Obviously I was an idiot: the "medium was the message" -- but it couldn't have gotten going until another revolution (TCP) already existed.
So consider something like Bitcoin: I'm pretty sure BC isn't going to make it (and Youtube wasn't the first either) but some elements, recombined with other ones, will be quite influential.
Oh, and revolutions take a long time to get going. They just look fast in retrospect and at the time because you can't see the rest of the iceberg.
Given that the majority of "YouTubers" today are tweens, I'd say the real decisive factor there was that there are people who want to post videos to the web but don't have a website (or any desire for one.) YouTube, beyond its social-networking aspects, was (and still is) a video pastebin, which is something that (AFAIK) didn't exist until then.
In fact, as far as ideas go, "a pastebin for [file format X with huge file sizes], where other people can view your [X] embedded on the page, and you don't have to pay for the bandwidth charges incurred when they do" is almost always a winner.
Unfortunately "seemed" got autocorrected to "seems", and I didn't catch it, grr!
Oh hell no! ;) I mean that only with love & nostalgia, not to challenge your opinion. But that sounds like grass-is-greener syndrome, because networking and coding used to downright suck compared to today.
It's cool to see that getting a port number was easy in 1995, but keep in mind how silly it is to have to get a port number in the first place. That comes from needing to keep port names very small, in 16 bits. At some point someone is going to invent a scheme that uses names instead of numbers and reshape the internet again...
There are definitely lots of areas ripe with cherries, maybe even more now than there were then, and I suspect there is now less luck and more merit involved too. AI is in it's infancy right now, and people are making huge contributions with fairly simple improvements. Even as far as ssh & networking goes, we're having a global crisis of privacy as we speak, there are grand canyons of space waiting for people to fill & make a huge impact.
It will probably take caring about something through the hard times when nobody else seems to care, or solving something specific that ends up getting lucky, or a massive ton of rallying, but there are plenty of ways to participate and shape and define your future that will have a huge impact!
That exists already: https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
Scroll past the port numbers, and you will find plenty of protocols with only a name registered. This name is used by DNS SRV records. If you’re designing a new protocol today, you don’t need a reserved port number. Just do what Minecraft did and require SRV records to point to whatever port number is used. The load balancing and failover features of SRV records are a nice bonus.
Almost certainly there will be multiple such inventions. Internet-magnitude inventions happen once every ten years or so. The trick is that such things are generally very hard to recognize while they are still small enough for an individual to make a significant contribution. It's often hard to recognize them even when you are in the middle of them. They are often lost in a sea of very similar looking things that end up going nowhere (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers). Being part of Something Big is largely a matter of luck. The best you can do is to stack the odds in your favor by hanging out some place that Cool Things Happen and never stop trying new things. But many people do that for a lifetime without catching a wave.
You can also do something similar, at your own level and with your own pace - my near octogenarian father has had his commits accepted by the Drupal people, which I was impressed by as he had to learn things like PHP for that. Sounds like you want more than to just work on someone else's app, so upstream 'defining' the web, look at what is happening in worlds like SVG, or if that does not seem like 'as fun as Lego was' to you then find some other area that you can learn/master/push on from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
New technology brings about new opportunities. BitTorrent wasn't feasible back in the 90s because there weren't enough users who were always online to seed files. The question is how do we use this new technology in a way to accomplish tasks we might otherwise thought impossible?
I think these things are a bit "right place right time". It has to be early enough that you can contribute, but that early and you never know if it's going to go anywhere. Any later, and the opportunity is gone.
Last additions from me are the perfecting of the voice recognition (I love Alexa but still room for radical improvement) and also subvocal wearables (I'm sure this is within reach of our generation, imagine ease of speaking but retaining public-use)
There probably are big inventions waiting to be discovered out there that could benefit from your skills - finding them or getting started on them might be difficult though.