The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
panix.com
panix.com
For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress.
Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant.
A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another 30 pounds and another $1000 for the docking stations and mice and ergonomic plastic monitor stands and Ethernet AUI for your 10BASE-5 Local Area Network.
JPEG was not yet a thing. [edit: yes, it was; Netscape Navigator shipped with JPEG support in December 1994. But that's before this original article was released.]
Shareware. I actually paid for a license for PKZip!
And I bought a Netscape license too -- I think it was 2.0, it was $40. That was their business model: sell browser software. The server happened the following year.
NeXTStep Developer License was $3000 per year. Windows MSDN was not free, either. I paid for a $2000 annual subscription at least once.
Linux was shaping up remarkably quickly, a rallying point for open source userland tools... but BSDi wasn't free. Any other UNIX was thousands of dollars -- that Open Group industry model.
The 1990s were expensive and awkward.
I am utterly stunned that it all turned out as well as it has: NeXTStep in every pocket, and Linux in every other pocket, and most tools are free, the Internet everywhere, and strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.
It's not perfect but it was going to be so much worse.
We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel.
3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or whatever, the CPU and RAM wouldn't cut it. Besides, a decent new PC would "only" cost you around half of what you paid back in 1994/1995.
When I purchased a gaming PC in early 2008, that PC could still handle modern games 10 years later! And that was a mid-level gaming PC I paid around $1k for.
- A 64 MB Ram module, not bad for games and a boost for Win95.
AMD K6. Not as good as a late Pentium II/early Pentium III , but it would be much better than a Pentium 120.
https://www.forbes.com/1999/06/21/mu2.html?sh=4dc70c70494b
Then, the K7 was more expensive but damn cheap compared to a Pentium III.
It was actually novel when you'd find a well written piece of software that did its job well and didn't crash (at least for me, being poor and stuck in the world of DOS/Windows). Things like AutoCAD that people used to do actual work. Early WordPerfect struck me as pretty good too.
I still resent Microsoft and particularly Gates for keeping the state of computing in the dark ages for so long. Using Linux (circa 96 or so) was such a revelation, it's hard to explain how massive the jump in capability was. That Microsoft went so long not even leveraging protected mode in commodity OSs (not NT) speaks volumes.
It is nice to reflect on how far we've come, but I also appreciate Alan Kay's perspective on things: that phone and iPad style environments are primarily designed for passive consumption, and we could do a lot more to empower the users of these devices. But still, we're absolutely light years ahead of where we were!
On Linux distros and BSD's, a proper KDE setup from 3.5.10 times was light years ahead of Windows 98 and even Windows XP with Konqueror blending the file manager, the shell and the browser.
In '94 I was running some then-ancient - but still horrifically expensive - Mac, barely able to connect to a dial-up ISP on my ancient rural phone lines. The entire system was essentially impenetrable to me; I didn't even have any kind of concept of how I might write software for it and had no idea where to learn. The primitive tools I could find, like resedit or applescript, could hardly scratch the surface of what was possible.
Linux existed then, surely, but it wasn't something I could have sussed out myself until later on. The idea that everything running on a computer could have source code that you could read, and then build into a workable system, was completely unfathomable to me until I went off to college.
Now, any would-be programmer can start programming with an immensely powerful IDE after a few minutes, and they can access millions of lines of "in the wild" high quality code in hundreds of programming languages instantly.
As much as some things seem to have failed us along the way, at least in this respect things have indeed worked out better than I could have imagined.
Resedit -> ResHacker
Apple Script -> VBScript
Now, heck, the OS for hackers (9front) it's dumb easier on design and C programming. And, before, Linux with {Perl and/or TCL}/TK made casual coding zillions times easier than Win32.
Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.
Either way, the statement I replied to was 'Linux in every other pocket'. Since almost all Android users are running the Google Play Services, my point stands.
And that was assuming you had a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you were looking at stacks of floppies. (I still remember being told not to waste money buying pre-formatted floppies because a stray boombox would erase that formatting. I mean, true or not, that piece of advice is so perfectly of a specific era it deserves to be remembered. Besides, you couldn't get more capacity out of the disk if you went with the formatting The Man recommended.) Even hard disks were hilariously slow and low-capacity back then, especially if your computer was more scuzzy than SCSI.
Also:
> strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.
Communications Decency Act! Marty Rimm! Clipper Chip! Skipjack!
There. Have I put a sufficient amount of The Fear into you yet?
Wholly agree. Developing an application to be deployed to 100-200 users using a desktop client-server model easily ran into the thousands (tens of thousands today) and made one think very hard about which platforms were used.
Hard choices had to be made simply because you couldn't afford the cost of entry.
Fantastic.
We eventually downloaded and built Mosaic for X-windows, and I still remember the look on my boss' face when we scrolled down in an article about Shoemaker–Levy and there was a photo of it hitting Jupiter. He nearly fell off his chair.
So, I suppose that means I've been on the Internet for at least 28 years... ugh.
Funny, on that page there's also a quip about "why does everybody feel like their homepage need to have a 100kb image to slow down page loads to a crawl?"
Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.
https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_use...
See also the Russ Allbery spam rant https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
Someone at a university cancelled the message, but then felt pangs of guilt. He emailed me an apology and then offered to send me the disks through the mail. I emailed him back my address, and he sent the disks to me through the "snail mail" as they called it back then.
But it got knarlier than that. Scientology's texts were copyrighted; they had police seize the servers of people who put copies of the texts online.
Wired had a good write-up: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/
That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".
As a matter of fact, it was this sign that started my investigation into the goings on at said company and my discovery that the owner, sales manager, production manager and H.R. person were all full fledged Scientologists. Needless to say, I quit that job. But it wasn't over.. on my exit interview they grilled me on why I was quitting/what I thought of the company. Then they spent the next 2 years trying to serve me for stealing documents that I didn't steal.
Also that HTML!
<html>
<BASE HREF=http://www.mecklerweb.com/mags/iw/v6n1/feat26.htm>
<TITLE>v6n1 January 1995 Best and Worst</TITLE>
<H1>The Best and Worst of 1994 and
Predictions for '95</H1>
<I>by Eric Berlin</I><P><I>
</I><HR>
No </P>'s to be found :-)
"2.14.1 Paragraph
<P>
Level 0
The Paragraph element indicates a paragraph. The exact
indentation, leading, etc. of a paragraph is not defined
and may be a function of other tags, style sheets, etc.
Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space
of one line or half a line. This is typically not the
case within the Address element and or is never the case
within the Preformatted Text element. With some HTML
user agents, the first line in a paragraph is indented.
Example of use:
<H1>This Heading Precedes the Paragraph</H1>
<P>This is the text of the first paragraph.
<P>This is the text of the second paragraph. Although you
do not need to start paragraphs on new lines, maintaining
this convention facilitates document maintenance.
<P>This is the text of a third paragraph.https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-0...
This is still "true". You can't embed a <P> in another <P>. It's special that way.
I've never tried it using JS with just an addChild though, I wonder what would happen...
Even the MDN docs show "hr" examples without closing: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/hr
Though they prefer to show "p" with closing tags (they mention it's optional though, and auto-close when one of several other tags are found: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/p).
HTML was designed to be written by hand as previous generations of typesetting languages. I think this is the main difference from XML, and this was the reason of a war in the 90's about making HTML a sub-set of XML: see XHTML (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/XHTM...)
br too.
p not closing feels a bit like a MS Word pilcro. In that regard I get it.
Coincidentally, in April of this year, I got an urgent request from someone parsing 1994-era HTML, to change the ancient Racket permissive HTML parser, to support the even more ancient 1994 `p` elements better: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-parsing/#%28part._.H...
Vaguely related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694849 ("Write HTML Right", ~2 months ago, 205 comments)
Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet.
I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world, how much of it is due to the internet becoming more popular and how much of it is due to certain platforms that are designed in a way that encourages their users to act badly. If we could take the internet back to 1990s levels of interactivity but with everybody still having a web browser in their pocket, would things be better or is today's internet worse because society as a whole is worse?
Just not as much for the nerds and curious professionals from “the West” that were playfully developing the internet like a quirky little collaborative art gallery.
The demographics of the internet were just very different then. I don’t think it’s so much a change in the character of the world that makes it different now, so much as that nearly the whole breadth of the world are staking claims in it, and thus a lot of the contention and animosity that has always existed in the real world now finally shows up here too.
Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms.
Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on each other they mostly overlap - and both seem hell bent on ruining the other.
Sure, lots of people were using it. But many of them couldn't openly advertise their feelings or form social groups. It was a domain of the technical and the young.
There won't be anything else like that feeling.
The name for that feeling is Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
(note that happened around two decades before FB)
They were definitely there, you just couldn't see them or they weren't happening in your country or to people you knew. But there was a period of relative peace from the end of the Cold War to 9/11, and a great deal more "consensus". This was achieved because there was nowhere for people outside the consensus to get heard.
> society as a whole is worse
To the extent that this is true - and I don't think it applies to all of today's society, many of whom are more tolerant and better informed - is it an effect of the internet on society?
What I meant by "few real problems in the world" is that compared to global pandemics, terrorist attacks, the return of 70s style economic malaise, aging populations (in the 00s, this was a Japanese problem but it is now becoming a global problem) and the possibility of a nuclear WW3 if the tensions with Russia and/or China escalate, whatever problems people perceived in the 90s were trivial in comparison. Even the problems that remain unsolved from that time (like climate change) are generally much worse today because of decades of inaction. Its really hard to take seriously "problems" like the president having an affair with his intern or a famous football player getting acquitted of a murder that most people think he committed when you live in a time where the end of the world in the near future is a plausible outcome.
What? Life was certainly worse in the 1990s compared to today on almost all axes except for how much people complain about it online.
But I'm sure it was a much better time on the Internet I didn't yet know existed because my family couldn't afford a computer until my senior year of high school.
Were you in Rwanda in '94?
The quickest way to contextualize this article is that it’s like asking crypto true believers to write about crypto a few years ago, just as it was becoming mainstream. Of course someone said there were no real problems on the internet.
> The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn't just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity.
I still play it today, but under Slashem.
A crazy thing: Nethack 3.4.3 was released in 2003 and it was for long THE latest release of Nethack until the 3.6.x banch. Thus, that release was ported to anything capable, from Amigas to Ataris, Windows, DOS, PowerPC Macs, M68k Macs, Solaris boxes, the PSP, Android, iOS... everything.
Oh, and the lack of releases until Nethack 3.6.x helped Slashem to develop a lot.
>The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000).
telnet freechess.org 5000. Same spirit. Use XBoard if you want some GUI.
>Software that handles virtually all network functions via one seamless interface will emerge and begin to dominate the commercial Internet marketplace.
Netscape and Mozilla Suite. Now Chrome it's almost an OS.
For the rest: http://theoldnet.com
The two standards are more and more different each year XD
Public IP addresses, for example. Big sites have public routeable IPs, end users are behind one or more levels of NAT. You have to pay extra money to be able to be able to open ports 80/443.
> All data are Mosaic. What is it about the World-Wide Web that makes everyone want to stick 100-K pictures on their home pages? Add that to the incredible inefficiencies and poor designs of the Gopher and HTTP (WWW) protocols and we see another generation of computing resources torpedoed by the enthusiasm and poor programming of graduate students.
Now even the programming languages and runtimes are Web-based! Inefficiencies are compound.
Canter and Siegel- two names that don’t mean much to people nowadays but that was a turning point in the “spam” industry.
I still have my copy of the Whole Internet Catalog on my bookshelf. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve come from. I’ll have to share it with my kids some day.
Thanks for the trip back memory lane.
Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...
> Worst: Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.
Then they opened the teleco sector, prices went down, but then lots of small telecos and ISP's were eaten by the biggest fish, and the prices went a bit higher again (not as high, OFC, until we got a flat rate conn in Spain it was around ~1999).
We still don't have a free local call contract for example. SMS' are still paid, but everyone switched into Whatsapp around 10 years ago with smartphones and you get free calls to anywhere in Spain with an $20 internet connection, but not like the US where you have free local calls without doing anything.
Today there should be some connection for 10 EUR (~$10?) with a slower bandwidth, not everyone nets a fiber conn. And OFC I would declare 56K internet free, forever, with just a land line. Basic for IRC, Jabber, WA, small web pages, goverment pages such as the ones for applying for dates at the healthcare service, (hello Spanish ministries, you should copy the UK one, it runs on any browser) and so on.
Made me smile... especially the last line. :)
> Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.
In terms of technical description, they were closer to today's web3 smart contracts than how Google works.
In the end, nothing came of all that hype tho. Turns out it was easier to build Google :-)
Remote Robot Arm (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au)
Still resolves to a website related to the project
This is interesting as well:
"NOTE: The Telelabs System will be closed from late December till the end of February to conserve electrical energy and reduce associated greenhouse emissions."
How I wish this existed. Something like BBS and online forums, with the ability to create private channels with E2E encryption.
There’s probably no commercial viability, but the idea of a common interface for communities sounds awesome.
They have Usenet, mail, IRC and some sort of local (for use inside a single a server) and federated (the message from a user it's spread across all the federation) BBS'.
We were just getting internet access going at my engineering office, and in a "stop press" submission to our weekly "desktop published" newsletter I submitted some photos of the comet hitting Jupiter I downloaded that day before it made the evening TV news.
People were predicting that sometime very soon(TM) everyone will be cancelled "just because someone doesn't like their ideas", people still having huge arguments on global warming, "any tragic event" has people who "taunted its seriousness", and Nethack is still awesome.
Someone had camped that domain (The actual one being nasa.gov) for porn.
ICS was fantastic back in the day (shout out to FICS that has been great since 1998 and still going). I'll never forget being logged into ICS on 9/11 while watching the towers get hit and chatting on there with different people around the country and the world stunned at what was going on.
Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions
Well atleast cryptocurrencies solved that.
Well, I could have finished uni a lot quicker without knowing about them.
I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.
Oh man, I remember that! I was always pissed that the IRC server I had access to had bad connectivity, and I had bad connectivity to it. Even if I knew the answer right away it was impossible to be first.
Replace AOL here with some other big internet companies I don’t have to name and it’s the same story
Luakit for JS masked crapwar... web sites.
Oh: https://wiby.me
Have fun :)
Addon Gopher site for Lynx, a good place to (re)start Gopher, kinda similar to the web portals from mid-late 90's:
gopher://magical.fish
Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups”
Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.
"This effect may be considerable in a few centuries", indeed