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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier.

The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!)

Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you'd just open a terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists)

I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it.

Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)

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I wasn't familiar with Freshmeat but you just unlocked a part of my memory mentioning everything2... I spent a lot of time of that site in 2001-2002 (probably earlier as well as a lurker, but that's the years when I wrote things), I really loved it and was also very useful for me to practice English writing at a time when my English skills were still rather limited (I remember writing my texts painfully slowly, and looking words up...).

I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover).

I might write again from time to time...

Thanks for mentioning it!

PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.

Indeed yes, E2 was so much better in many ways than things like Wikipedia (and worse in other ways, of course).

The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing.

Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).

I loved e2. It was such a shame to see it fall in to disuse as everyone flocked to wikipedia.

Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more nurturing of creativity.

I (dmd) was in the top 5% of noders back then, went to a bunch of gatherings (like https://everything2.com/title/I%2527M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHD... ). It was a wonderful time.

Wow! Lots of memories flooding back. I (Xamot) remember your nickname. E2 was definitely an interesting place, bringing together people from many walks of life. I meet many people, who influenced who I am today. And it is unlikely that I would have met such a range of people otherwise.

Yes, also remember a meetup in London, was ... interesting.

(used 'The Alchemist' as a username - probably because I was into reading about it at the time. Unfortunately most people probably thought I liked that book of the same name).

Hola, from me, dizzy

Hey dizzy!

I remember that name.

I went to a meetup in Melbourne. Met a girl in Chicago. Discovered that someone else lived literally on my street, a third of a mile away. I had several small world experiences on E2.

I was known as dizzy. It's been a long, long time :)

i remember you ;) and it was a wonderful time indeed.

Do I remember you? What do you remember?

you might not. my name is raj, and i used to run a hosting company called voxel.net — i believe you were a customer “back in the day” but i could be getting my wires crossed ;)

Hah, yes! I hosted my personal domain 3e.org - which I've now had for 26 years! - with you from 2000-2003 or so. (After that I was on 'server4you' for a bit, self-hosting everything on a VPS, and then Dreamhost since 2005.

I went to high school with CmdrTaco (Slashdot) and Nate (Everything2). I built sets for plays with Rob and was Nate's lab partner in AP Bio. Both were (are) brilliant guys, and super nice. Rob's sense of humor was one of a kind. (Jeff Bates was also a great guy, but I didn't know him as well.)

It was a unique time back in the late 90s, and those guys had their finger on the pulse of internet nerdom. It was pre-Facebook, pre-"Web 2.0" pre a lot of things. In a lot of ways Slashdot was the spiritual predecessor to Hacker News, so we owe that crew a debt.

Did you ever listen to "Geeks in Space", the Slashdot podcast from before podcasts were a thing?

IIRC they recorded sporadically around 1999 and 2000, just talking about whatever had been on the front page recently. I've thought about doing a sort of retrospective, listening to each one and writing a blog post about what they found interesting... it's a neat peek back at a different time and a different culture.

No, I didn't. I wonder if any of those episodes are still around?

https://archive.org/details/Geeks_In_Space

Yeah... when I said I would go back 20 years, this is what I was talking about... sort of... Those were the great times! Maybe I am just old and nostalgic and it may be something everyone does, but for real, those times had lots of issues, too, sure, but there were great things. People had interest in philosophy, free Internet, and so forth.

You're just old and nostalgic. (No worries, so am I).

People still have interest in philosophy, free Internet and so forth.

Nothing is gone, it's just been made a bit less obvious.

Agreed it is mostly nostalgia. But it _was_ a unique time: the internet was pretty new for many people, and not ubiquitous like it is today.

All of those guys were great, but oddly I interacted the most with Hemos, probably due to mutual interests in things like Frank Herbert and weird ambient music (e.g. Eno, Laswell).

They were never bad people to be around.

I remember working at early-stage Amazon in 1998, and I would check Slashdot something like 4-5x per day. I remember that period before and after Slashdot was acquired by Andover.net fondly, especially CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal.

I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!

I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules.

Saying my humor was One of a kind doesn’t mean “funny” :)

I watched Freshmeat, religiously, for updates to GTK, WindowMaker, and WMPrefs. I don't even know why I built each release other than because I could and because I was learning so much.

I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today.

It was a neat time to live in, for sure.

Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm.

You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.

Enlightenment was a particular favourite for me! But Rasterman is, as far as I know, still coding like crazy on new versions of Enlightenment: https://www.enlightenment.org/

It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use.

The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).

Tizen is practically dead.

It's a hellscape of misery and suffering.

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

You left out the best part-- the enlightenment developer starts replying in page five of the comments and gets caught up in a flame war!

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan...

It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?

That article is wrong on several levels and the author just doesn't seem to understand what is going on. The whole part about how to set up windows is him not understanding that he's working with a retained mode scene graph - something the documentation[0] makes that clear.

Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written.

[0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...

Don’t forget the dark arts of configuring the Modeline in your X config to get that rock solid, flicker free screen of ridiculous resolution. And when you would push the limits and hear your crt scream in protest or start tumbling, tearing or just tapping out.

Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore.

The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

> Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore.

> The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

> Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one).

Now everything is so easy...

Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer, but I do remember having to download the driver for my sound card (Aureal Vortex<$something>) and compile an out-of-tree-module to get sound.

For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details.

And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs.

In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.

The closest I have to those is painstakingly trying every single VESA driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that would work with whatever off-brand video card the 386 happened to have (it was an Oak driver, though I think the card just happened to be compatible with it).

Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so.

I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!

He worked on OpenMoko for a while when they chose enlightenment libs for the UI.

I still use last.fm lol

I started using it when it still was called AudioScrobbler... I miss "the old internet" so much!

I do too, but I wish they'd do something with it instead of letting it languish. Scrobbling keeps breaking. How hard could it be to keep a scrobbling site up in 2022?

The Enlightenment that has always been 17 and we were waiting for it to finally turn to 18? The one that had transparent windows through some plugins or whatever? Hell yeah! I installed it on Gentoo and when I made the windows transparent, I felt like I could do anything! I had Beryl, too, at some point.

I spent a few minutes a day over a couple of weeks tweaking my i3 desktop. It's still a thing :)

I was watching Twitch developer stream where the young streamer was working with a new TUI library/service discussed earlier on HN[1]. I half jokingly asked a question if it worked with real hardware terminals, in particular a DEC VT420, and the developer didn't even know what that is.

Feels old, man.

Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420, but I understand why that's not exactly a priority.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332

Feels... yeah... sorta saddening.

Zoom out. Ignoring the fact everyone now has a supercomputer in their pocket, now you can literally outcompute that era of terminals for <$1. Huge flat screens hang in literally every room with resolutions dozens of times higher per axis than anything of that period. Voice input is finally here, and the very notion of a 'terminal' has become an anachronism.

In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.

> The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!)

VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient.

I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset some LTGC.

I purchased some wisdom with that experience.

Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266

(I must be really boring at parties.)

I was a broke student. I sold first day (luckily) just because I didn't have the money to hold onto them for any length of time. Worked out, but then my school took it back by reducing my financial aid award (OUCH).

> I purchased some wisdom with that experience.

That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)

And kuro5hin, a sort of mix between Slashdot and Substack...

Yep, I remember spending far too much time reading kuro5hin.

yes! the company i started after working for va linux ended up hosting kuro5hin for the longest time. it was a pretty tight community for a few years.

And SourceForge. It was the GitHub of its day, in terms of ubiquity and popularity.

It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was available.

Once the old guard left or were jettisoned from VA, the fall was inevitable. The desperation crept in to survive and it rapidly became a race to the bottom.

I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.

"Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more."

kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible archive of.

That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was worth even a penny.

I've since wondered who made that first article talking about bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I only have my own memories to go on.

I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for certain tasks...

Many of the people you meet in cloud services today at places like IBM, Dell, HP etc, are "old hippies" from that internet 1.0 era. Or even earlier from the Unix golden age of SG and Sun workstations. Mostly drifting into sales / pm roles. Although everyone remembers things differently. That institutional grounding of having to build internet services from fiber up really puts things in perspective for how easy it is to spin up a cluster ;)

> I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it.

Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and realized you were already well into the eternal September by that stage!

(I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see CPU and operating system and other software designers from different organizations debating everything from kernels to TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under their real names.)

Yes, usenet, good old deeply technical discussions like

"Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz...

by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)

See, even the flamewars were more epic back then.

And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart.

Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.

i really like how the advogato site got preserved on archive.org through redirects from the original site. so that all urls pointing to it are still working.

On more than one occasion I got called to a 'please explain' meeting to clarify that Freshmeat was not a "barely legal" porn site.

Your comment was exactly what I had in mind when I posted this story - especially the bit about Enlightenment!

I somehow feel tiling WMs occupy the same mindspace these days.

old open source hippies unite! Thank you for posting this, you really made my day :D

> Slashdot

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

total nostalgia bomb.

i can’t tell you how much valinux changed my life.

the excitement. the possibilities. the dotcom money.

most of all the people - like rasterman, octobrx, rasmus of php fame.

insane coalescence of talent.

working there part time on linux.com was such a foundation experience for me as a freshman in college.

i feel like an old hippie now too.

but forever greatful to LNUX

Same, fam. Same.

I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.

I have a lot of fond memories from around those times too. especially when linuxworld expo was in San Jose. you could drive by the VA Linux offices. Caldera OpenLinux was in a box at Fry's.

thanks for the fun memories. :)

Don't forget Digg and Fark. I spent time on those post-slashdot / pre-reddit.

... and when you needed to bail out and rest your brain, instead of youtube or tiktok, we all surfed AdCritic.com

Those Bubble 1.0 adverts were the best.

Sputnik, LinuxCare, GLP (fringe side), fark...

Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast

I remember when I discovered Slashdot, using lynx as my browser. Felt like a whole wide world had opened up.

Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.

Remember MKLinux as well?

> Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible

So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !

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