Ask HN: Its the year 1996 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Its the year 1996

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For some reason you just woke up in your body from 1996, but you still have your mind and knowledge from today. How do you exploit this kind turn of events?

If you tried to build the next facebook, would you be able to do it with the technology of the day? There is no asp.net, php doesn't come out until next year, and java is crude. Even if you did build it, the time just might be wrong. The world may not be willing to accept twitter yet.

Lets say you know enough about tech from the day, and you've found an idea who's time it is. Are you physically capable of executing? I am 23 so in 1996 I was still in elementary school. Domains cost $70, and as a kid, thats a lot.

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In 1996 I was in school and broke :-)

One major difference for me in the intervening period is the availability of free development platforms. In 1996 I couldn't have coded up a basic LAMP webapp even if I knew how and options for free desktop app development were rather restricted; the idea of, as a relative novice, coding what I could with today's tools but in gcc and a text editor just doesn't bear thinking about. The barriers to entry were just so much higher.

Plus, as you mentioned, if you want to host online then that becomes vastly more expensive too. A good part of the explosion of technology that we're enjoying now is a product of it becoming far more viable for students to play and produce something of comparable quality to commercial endeavours, at least superficially.

All that said:

It took me years to learn that action today is almost invariably better than action tomorrow. Still not always great at putting that knowledge into practice. I'd have drummed that into myself, hard. Tinker. Experiment. Test concepts. Remember that what isn't viable today may be perfectly viable in a few years time as technology and adoption levels improve. Ideas multiply when you execute because you gain a better insight into the possible.

Don't just think, do.

I agree, i think one of the biggest ideas to take away from my little thought experiment is the concept that just because something failed a few years ago does not mean it will fail today!

I would convince my parents to buy tons of Apple stock.

I would ask that girl on a date and follow through.

I would get a cochlear implant sooner.

That's a fun thing to think about. In 1996 I was 12, and quite shy. So I'd probably start to have fun with soon, being a lot more confident than I was back then.

I'd be terribly bored in classes, and thus I'd start to get bad grades. Still I might catch up on some foreign languages that I neglected in school.

I'd immediately start to play my favorite sport (table tennis) in a club, and thus have chances to actually excel at it.

At the end of my school career I'd invest a bit of money in companies that I happen to know turn out to be quite successful.

But most of all I'd enjoy having time and energy for studying another topic besides the ones I'm relatively good at. And when bored, I could try to write a good, distributed version control system, or some fun web application that nobody thought of back in the days...

Personally, I would write a game such as Quake.

But I have about ten years experience with game dev, which is probably a special-case situation.

(P.S. tasteful use of C++ features allows you to approach the productivity level of other languages.)

(But the fact is I tend to prefer writing in C over C++, and Lua over both.)

(But yeah it would be silly to write a web app in C or C++.)

I'm in my mid-30s, so I sometimes look back and wonder what I could have done differently. I launched my first ecommerce site in 1997, and it was just much too early. If anything, I wish I had just spent more time thinking about domain names to register and keep.

I would lobby for improved ballots in West Palm Beach.

I'm not sure as a 10 year old I'd have had that much ability to persuade my parents of the virtues of domain names or selected tech stocks as investments. In my early teens on the other hand...

The opportunity that immediately springs to mind as having the lowest technical barrier to entry is a Craigslist-type service, starting off in the same way at round about the same time as a mailing list. A sufficiently smart ten year old with indulgent parents probably could have started that that on dialup AOL too...

1. Get a crap job, live with your parents, and start buying domain names.

2. Spend a year writing your own scripting language.

3. Then start building basic services (free email service!).

I think we had Hotmail and Rocketmail by that point, but I could be wrong.

"Register business.com" is an easy one.

But really, looking back is rather painful--too much heartache, too many missed opportunities.

It would be far better to look at today with tomorrow's hindsight.

I would have bought basketball.com. Looking back, it was a deal back then.

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