Someday, in the far, far 90s, we had LAN. And everything worked.
Now, you need 5Mbit speeds just to collaborate. Funny how the tech "progressed".
Now, you need 5Mbit speeds just to collaborate. Funny how the tech "progressed".
What you have in stock is nostalgia, my friend. Everything worked? Like Windows 95 crashing if you looked at it sideways, Linux requiring you to compile drivers for pretty much any device yourself, like fifteen competing printer protocols all incompatible with each other? You might want to get a reality check :)
We used the "Excel Shared Spreadsheet" functionality. The file was hosted on a network drive. It corrupted or crashed so frequently - even when only one person had it open - that we took to copying it to your local machine, making the network copy read-only, editing the local copy, then copying back onto the network drive. Even this was buggy, so possession of a stuffed octopus represented a lock on the file. Microsoft themselves got involved at one point, as we were a reseller for their products. Their solution was no better.
So if there was a halcyon period for collaboration at some point in the past, I'd like to know when it was. When I see 100 people live editing the same Google Sheet, I think perhaps we are in the golden age.
Today, with spotty internet, software you have or could have on your device might or might not work. Just recently I have seen a website which loaded, but was non-functional until 2 mins later a cookie warning was also loaded.
Nothing in there is about
> the number of active internet users, malware, services, goods sold
but about not building for applications only loading half (because we are still waiting for some obscure JS or CSS from not the original domain that noone really never needs.)
Picking a random example: "AirPrint®, Brother iPrint&Scan, Mopria™ , Cortado Workplace, Wi-Fi Direct®".
Will a lists like that be enough to overcome your fear and skip the costly upsell to exactly the same printer, but it also understands PCL6? (likely a bit flipped in the firmware...) You decide. It's like a reverse confidence trick: "look, it's 2023 already and it's awesome, you really don't need PCL6 anymore. Trust me."
you can use gimp to take images and make them into coloring book pages, you can print instructions, calendars, drawings, diagrams; prompts for writing, your own writing to make sure that the "screen" isn't tricking your brain making you miss editing/grammar errors. Coloring pages, maps of countries, and other educational things are more fun if you can hold them and put them on your wall, if my kids are any indication. Having a scanner and a copier and a networked printer in a single box for what they cost - that makes it difficult to see the aversion.
I have had fancy e-readers since the original kindle, and before that a Clie and two palm pilots with acrobat and an epub (or whatever) reader. and i still prefer dead wood. I read more books on paper than e-ink. I read more on a computer screen than books, though.
Now our printers, cars, and soon fridges are DRM-locked and doing surveillance.
And they can stop working at any time if the manufacturer goes bankrupt or simply stop supporting them.
I also run a PBX, just in case coturn decides to stop working from lack of use. Now i gotta make sure i start the PBX app (3cx) once a week otherwise android helpfully removes notifications for me!
AIM, ICQ, etc were great - and i'm discounting "presence", because that was a small part of it. realtime communication for "free". I've been running chat servers for over a decade, and right now, there's three people on my matrix server, me, wife, and my best friend. there's five people on my PBX, same three plus my youngest child without a SIM card, and grandma, so grandma can call kid and vice versa. I've run ircd, matrix, rocket.chat, mattermost, a couple of the jabber systems, ventrilo, teamspeak, hand-rolled garbage.
we've had people sign up and chat once, but as soon as notifications stop working we never see them again. Heck, i have 3 PUSH accounts just to make sure that notifications go through everywhere.
Meanwhile, 20-25 years ago, load up trillian or AIM/ICQ and there was everyone, literally everyone. I know facebook ate that lunch, but i refuse to have any facebook apps on my phone, and most people i know refuse as well, so that's a non-starter. Texting is still spotty, because VoWiFi tends to just magically stop working if you leave the wifi area a couple times in a day, so texts will sit in limbo until you realize. Phone calls are the same way (except via PBX, those always seem to work for some reason...)
running out of IPv4 and the ubiquitousness of CGNAT have killed what the internet was. And that's sad; "nostalgia" isn't necessarily a negative thing. It used to be better, at least in the West. Maybe wechat and signal and telegram and whatever work better for the rest of the world now than any of our stuff from 25 years ago, i wouldn't know, because i know exactly zero people on any of those services - i've checked, once every couple of years.
There are many things that killed what the Internet was in the 20-30 years hence. IPv4 exhaustion is regrettable, but entirely predicted, and for those in the west, not a huge deal. I can pay any number of cloud providers a small fee to host me a box with a publicly routable IPv4 address. CGNAT is annoying, but the number of libraries which will punch a hole in that NAT has also expanded by a huge margin since the 90's. So those up things are unfortunate, but I think there are many other things that changed the Internet, some for the better, some for the worse.
no, because everyone uses something different and there's no "trillian" or meebo for all the shiny-tech. If we're going to play "encrypted chat", that no one can agree what that means, or what service to use, may as well use my own. Hopefully matrix becomes more popular (it probably won't, unfortunately*), but if not, i still won't use the likes of telegram or FB messenger or tiktok DMs or anything of that nature. there's not a good IRC client for phones, last few times i checked over the past 15 years.
* Matrix has the curse of being good enough on the client side, but kind of a PITA on the server side. Synapse, the reference implementation is in python, which is single threaded, so joining a large room "as-is" out-of-the-box is not feasible. You have to split each of the synapse elements into a microservice that gets its own python instance, but the documentation was (and probably still is) quite sparse. I'm sure there's a discord where i can get help.
It's not much better on modern Fedora. The drivers do come precompiled but you have to reboot sometimes twice per week to install updates.
DSL & Cable encapsulates Ethernet. City-wide networks are again Ethernet. In fact, everything is Ethernet with some routers between.
So, you're actually using a mixed-carrier Enthernet LAN with a couple of NATs in the way. You can build another LAN on your LAN with VPN, too.
That was my point responding to OP. We actually progressed and we are facing new challenges.
A country wide router still can stay in service for a decade. Residential FTTx installations consist of a TelCo class switch, maybe a router, compact DSLAMs if you have DSL service and a couple of fibers in, tens of fibers out for FTTH customers.
It's faster hardware on the same stack. Nothing more, nothing less.
...and, oh, link-speed (transparent) DPI equipment in key places for lawful interception.
...and possibly a small DNS server (or a hosts file somewhere easy to get).
That's all you need.
If you want to navigate via IPs only, you can do with a DHCPd.
Depends on what you consider "work from home". You might not be able to chat with your co-workers without a WAN connection (unless you go really old-school and use a telephone), but you can for instance develop software from home without any working network connection (and git makes it easier by allowing you to create commits while offline; see also the "git bundle" subcommand). I've done so occasionally when the Internet connection goes kaputt.