Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

(Leaving aside the obvious Usenet) Gopher. GIFs. Webpages hewn out of raw HTML by amateurs. The time before 56.6 modems were ubiquitous. Walking away while a webpage loaded. Everything text based (MUDs, IRC). University computers offering you power you could never afford at home. Leaving downloads running overnight. The wild diversity of non-Ethernet networks. Physical computer retail stores. ICQ. Self-hosted persistent gaming servers. Napster being new.

View on HN

I guess we're just going to gloss over how much of a terrible thing Novell Netware and Lotus Notes were to sysadmin :D

What you call terrible I called job security.

Oh, so many things were terrible, but it was definitely different. And quaint.

I remember seeing my first digital photograph (a blurry, dark scan of a wine bottle label) on the web and being mesmerized. Because before that, web images were exclusively computer art.

Gopher, MUDs and IRC are still alive.

I roam around Cybersphere at least daily or every two days.

The possibilities in a MUD are much wider than, for example, Cyberpunk 2077.

One thing that is better is that the university computers are xeon hpc clusters now and you can ssh to it from anywhere with anything.

Eventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s

It's still nothing like today. I could connect to the cluster with my phone in a gas station bathroom if I wanted to. Imagine telling people from the 1970s the sheer amount of computational power I can trivially call up today over the course of a bowel movement on the side of the road.

Hewn? As in shaped out of a piece of wood. Great word to use in this context, bravo.

It seemed apropos to the experience of writing HTML.

Development now is so smooth.

Then? Fire up your chainsaw.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com