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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience.

But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV.

I guess it's something that you can instantly show to your friends.

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That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.

It's heartbreaking.

Shows we are not limited by technology but somehow get distracted by other things.

The "other things" are the short-termism and appealing to the lowest common denominator that go with the pursuit of profit before anything else.

I’m reading the book valley of genius where the xerox parc people basically make the same argument. The Xerox Alto’s smalltalk environment still isn’t matched today and the PC experience is much weaker for it.

The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.

kinda so did reasonably modern ideas. take active desktop for example! sure it’s more high level, but i believe the quote is that they wanted websites to do “cool things” with the desktop. cringeworthy by today’s standards...

things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over

In Usenet’s particular case it was its open, unmoderated nature that killed it - once it became 99% spam, warez and CP most ISPs dropped it.

There were moderated groups but IIRC they were updating more slowly because every message was reviewed.

Anyway, there was a certain barrier for entry so there were less users and messages. But some really good experts posted there. And some really fun jokers.

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