Let's all meet up in the Y2K | Hacker News Reader

Let's all meet up in the Y2K

blog.gingerbeardman.com

120 pointsmsephton87 comments

Focusing more on the "social side" rather the HW part, there is the part about the "Viral email", which must have been something that went viral in the UK Internet circles but not outside (I don't remember it and Y2K Internet was much smaller). Investigating about it you can end up reading The Register "article" about it [1] and well, that's something that definitely would not be published nowadays. Names and surnames of all the people involved in it, the literal sentence of the viral email copypasted there. It really shows how a different time it was regarding privacy and personal data.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010413114456/http://www.thereg...

EDIT: I mean, things like this obviously keep happening nowadays in closed (and not so closed) social media circles, but you won't see an online publication putting down names in written form like that.

I remember the fuss about that email. Yes thats a good point, our concept of privacy has evolved a lot since then. Privacy as a technical and political theme changed a lot post-2000. To my mind, Wikileaks in 2006 and Snowden in 2013 were big turning points, with Snowden essentially confirming that mass snooping was a reality (as many people had supposed, but then it became inarguable). Also on the social side, there's a much better understanding now of how damaging it can be for someone to suddenly go viral (e.g. star wars kid, etc).

> which must have been something that went viral in the UK Internet circles but not outside (I don't remember it and Y2K Internet was much smaller).

From a quick google it seems to have been reported in most of the tabloids and broadsheets.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/2000/12/16/Woman-in-hiding-afte...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1081543.stm

I'm not in an anglophone country, but I also have bad memory and n=1 so obviously I cannot speak for everyone else.

It's wonderful how they kept the name of the company where she worked, Magic Button, and Blueberry, out of the press. And the veil of mystery concocted by the crack marketing team has since seen the event cross the line into possible hoax. Time marches on never-ending!

"When work felt like home"

Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes

It's because of all the added abstractions. 20-30 years ago you were closer to the metal, similarly to how you would play with arduino now. But now all you get is blackboxes which fogs the mind.

De-alienate yourself! Feel the tools again! Learn low-level concepts and use them in your work (data-driven design, functional programming, etc.).

Then it's like woodworking and cooking again.

No it's because we're social animals that are supposed to be around other people. Sick of covid granting so much legitimacy to the antisocial among us. I actually think everyone should be forced to 5 day RTO for their own good

Plenty of us who prefer working from home have a very rich social life. It's just not centered around being in the same building together with the people you happen to work with.

I get to spend more time at social activities I enjoy on days I work remotely because I don't have to waste my time on a commute.

> I actually think everyone should be forced to 5 day RTO for their own good

I think you should get a life outside of the office.

I already have a rich social life outside the office

People like to maximize time they see their families

That's funny. As a remote worker (on and off since around 2003, exclusively since 2009), I guess you'd consider me an antisocial, and yet you're the one who wants to force people to do something. I'm fine with people who like going to an office, I just prefer not to. I wouldn't want to force everyone to work from home though.

Do you have a good social circle outside of work?

Yes of course

Interesting. Well, I'm glad you enjoy working from an office, but just so you know, while I'm sure the set of antisocial people intersects with that of people who like remote work, they're not equivalent. In my (admittedly anecdotal, just like yours) experience, the intersection is not that big, and it exists with the people who like working from an office too.

I have a rich social life that I enjoy, and I also despise working from offices. Fortunately, nobody can force me to do that because I'm not an employee, but it would suck for me if someone had that power over me.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to accept that people are different and enjoy (and dislike) different things.

> I'm fine with people who like going to an office, I just prefer not to. I wouldn't want to force everyone to work from home though.

Im not anti-social, but I'm an introvert with some very extrovert friends. I find interesting that we, introverts, "get" extroverts; I have no problem understanding people who like begin around other people all day long, I'm just not that guy.

But extroverts don't get introverts at all! A sentence like "yeah, I enjoy being alone by myself" feels like alien talk to them.

One might think so when alienated from the machine, but you can utilize the right temporal neocortex (mirror of your speech center on the left) which processes and emits emotions for whatever - it does not have to be other humans!

A race driver (dono anymore) called this "Mechanical Sympathy" and it's what happens when you work on what feels wrong / tedious etc when working on your computer. And that usually involves doing things down to the bits.

Can you look into your case on a memory bank and tell what chips hold what data? How it flows from the input of your fingers to the screen? A small C program using the framebuffer is within reach!

It's lovely!

Pirsig mentions this in his first book, and I always related to that part, as I'm the kind of person that "feels" the pain when someone turns a screw more than it can go, etc. Searching on the pilot you mention and the date of the book, I wouldn't be surprised if he picked up the term from Jackie Stewart indeed.

I like you! Pirsig yes, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - i got from Gemini it's Jackie Stewarts quote though.

Yeah, I see now my writing was confusing (it happens to me ...), as I meant to say Pirsig probably picked up the term from Stewarts.

In any case, great book. Gave it as a gift to my dad who was a mechanic when young and also rode a motorcycle (unlike Pirsig's' it as an Ariel though).

No, you’re wrong. I think everyone should be forced to remote work, and all offices should be closed forever.

…

See how it feels to have someone make absolute claims that tell you how to live your life?

> I actually think everyone should be forced to 5 day RTO for their own good

Fine. Let’s also break up companies that have offices in multiple cities and pick the maximum number of floors each company can occupy in a given office.

There isn’t anything more antisocial than going to a office where people wear headphones most of the times and don’t interact with each other because their project is spread across teams in multiple cities, often in different continents

That's true but it's nothing to do with local or remote work.

Claude, make a plan to refactor this repo to introduce low-level concepts like data-driven design, functional programming, etc.

Brilliant. You nailed it! It's not the effort you put into it ⸺ it's the (void) thought that counts!

Which borderline suicidal thought-pattern would you like to explore next?

I really like your super emdash

For reference, it's "Two-Em Dash" https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2E3A

I went down the rabbit hole yesterday and found the THREE-em dash exists too https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2E3B

I'd be more than happy to take your place on death row.

Work should never feel like home. If you feel that anywhere, that's a major red flag.

Same with coworkers calling everyone a "family" - nope, don't fall for that.

Working remotely was the greatest cure for this misaligned thinking.

> Diesel jeans and jumper, Deliverance food box on the partition (decades before Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, etc).

Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P

I consulted for Deliverance a bit later than Y2K (probably in 2004/5). They were a very strange company internally at the time.

First I want to say they weren't really like Deliveroo because they had their own kitchens. Or to be specific, one kitchen in Bloomsbury which made every major style of food. It was actually quite an amazing kitchen, with a Japanese sushi chef working next to an Indian curry cook and a pizza oven and a load more. (The quality of the food was top notch.) They also had their own salaried call centre and delivery staff.

At the time I was consulting they had been losing money hand over fist for years and their investors had parachuted in a "high powered executive" to sort everything out. She had not the first clue about the business, or the Internet, or much else, but everyone in the company deferred to her because she was the new big boss and shouted a lot. She used to turn up in a massive silver car late, order the sushi chef to make her a meal (for free obviously), and then leave early every day. Most of our work involved explaining why her ideas for the website and online advertising couldn't possibly work, which was very painful for me and everyone else. I pushed really hard to introduce a mobile-friendly website and did all the work on it, making the food menus work on the terrible web browser on some high end phone (of the time). It was all canned because the investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.

The company folded or was sold for parts soon afterwards.

> investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.

Was pizza delivery a joke to them?

Their model at the time was a heavyweight desktop-only website where you could look at the menus, then call their call centre (visible through a large glass window right next to the kitchens) where a human would pick up and take the order.

I wanted to explore a simpler website that would have worked on the very limited phones of the time. I'd just come back from Japan where I'd used i-mode phones. You could sort of see that it was going to happen soon. However apps as we know them now, and always-on mobile internet in general, were not a thing at that point in the UK, and it's very difficult to explain why this stuff might be important to less than clueful people.

(I don't want this to sound like I had some amazing insight that no one else could see. It could be equally valid to say that I didn't have a clear idea myself and/or didn't explain it well.)

Thanks for this recap. I'd heard much about their demise over the years, so it's good to hear it first hand!

I remember in the early 2010s we used to get so much food off deliverance to the office

We found out you could add a negative tip and it would discount it off the price, but no one exploited it too scared that if they banned our address we’d be eating Tesco meal deals instead.

These photos are incredible.

Would love to see a show with the seriousness and production quality of Mad Men but set in the 90s.

You could try this, from 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachments_(TV_series)

Well, my career started in 2000, so maybe that would be better. Just imagine a shop entirely staffed by white kids quoting whatever the zeitgeist had spat out last to each other while boiling over about trying to make a static website look right across IE, Netscape 4 and the oddity that was IE on Mac (way ahead of its time in CSS, but support was all over the place).

Start with the “Whazzzzzuuuppp” of the Budweiser Frogs in the first episode, end with your favorite Chappelle Show quotation for the last.

Not the 90s but check out Halt and Catch Fire: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

Thanks so much for your kind words, glad you enjoyed them!

Y2K was different because we got to see different shapes, sizes and types of hardware because there were so many companies that produced them. Nowadays it’s most a monopoly or a duopoly and everyone tries to copy whatever that is released by Apple and it’s quite boring

That, and even Apple's been copying others for a while now.

> Omni Trio being played regularly

that seals it.. my nostalgia for this time (from many an adult's tale in my young life) was not misplaced.

If only it still felt like this, you can see it sometimes, if only a little. And maybe we'll feel the same way looking back to now from what will be.

I played all the first five albums! The Deepest Cut Vol 1 (1995), Haunted Science (1996), Skeleton Keys (1997), Byte Size Life (1999) and Even Angels Cast Shadows (2001) which was brand new as the boom was imploding.

At my last employer we had a extensive photo gallery with workplace pictures taken from the 60s and up to present day, thousands if images. It was fun to browse through when you had some downtime.

But, as with this collection, I was most surprised how little things like fashion had changed between say 2000 and 2025. Sure, eyeglasses and some clothing articles (mostly suits/coats/ties, which were a bit roomier and bigger back then...) could give away the era, but in the pics where people just wore chinos or jeans and some casual sweater or t-shirt, not much has changed.

Compare that to looking at a picture from 2000 and just 1990, 10 years, and the difference is like night and day. Or 1990 and 1980.

At some point on the early 2000s, casual everyday wear among adults just stopped evolving, or slowed down tremendously. The giveaway is usually the tech and furniture, or photo quality (how it was captured).

Y2K is a strange half familiar, half alternate timeline sort of nostalgia, isn't it?

Yeah, any photos from the 60's to the 90's and you can pretty easily tell which decade it is. Maybe it's because we all went online, and so are less bothered about our physical style and more about our online persona where most of our interaction now takes place.

A nice nostalgia hit. The "Bondi blue" iMac was my first workplace computer, for a local council. I had Photohop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress, making websites, banner graphics(!), print artwork, all kinds of things. Even then, I do remember the iMac being painfully slow.

Oh yeah, original iMac was slow, especially if running OS X. We had the full range of iMac G3s in school, easiest way to tell if you got a good one was if it had a CD slot instead of a tray. Those were the coolest PCs ever.

I spy a copy of the "Cold Fusion Web Application Construction Kit"! I worked for Allaire in Sydney in 2000, then Macromedia when they got acquired in 2001. I used to visit a lot of studios like that. The dotcom boom was a wild ride.

I kept a Windows machine alive and kicking up until 5 years ago (Windows 7) and the last few years were all due to fear I would some day run into an issue I needed HomeSite to be able to fix. I lived in that app for so long, spent so much time tinkering with it to make it do things it shouldn’t be able to (or just creating my own macro buttons) and now I couldn’t tell you what I would need it for. To single right click and turn lines of text into an unordered list?

I will forever have a hate for ColdFusion and it is wild to me that people have kept it alive, but that probably matches my HomeSite superstition.

Also, the pooping reindeer brought back a flood of memories. What that says about me, well, let’s not.

I remember wanting to be important by upgrading the size of my monitor from the default 14" to 21" but unfortuantely, it also took up 50% of your desk space so I split the difference and lived with 17".

My very first work experience in a small software house in 1996 and their internet connection was ISDN so it had to dial-up and then got the staggering speed of 64Kb/s, you could also hear it so occasionally the boss would ask who was using it i.e. costing whatever we were metered at, which was probably like £1 for 5 minutes.

The internet was a bit different more homely in those days. Back in 1996 we hired a guy as network administrator. On his first day at work, we got an email from a network admin who was reading Usenet. He'd seen our new guy had posted the root password for his former place of work on Usenet (as some kind of revenge for something or other) and had managed to work out where the guy was now working and our contact details. We frog-marched our new employee out of the door and changed all the passwords.

In 1999 I was the first person I knew to get a TFT flatscreen monitor. It had the awesome capability of 1024x768 resolution at 14".

Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 2001 after the collapse, from Zeus Technology who had a high performance single-thread select-based webserver. We could feel the cascade failure as our ISP customers went bankrupt or stopped paying their invoices.

I badgered my parents into getting 64k ISDN installed at home in ~2000. Whatever the pitch was, IIRC my true motivation was to get double-digit ping times for Quake etc.

Playing from the north of Scotland on typical UK servers, that went from 200+ ms unstable on a normal modem, to 70ms stable. LPB† status, wahoo!

† http://lpb.urbanup.com/36431

"High prices shame Britain" made me chuckle

I tried dating that issue of Metro, but was unable to!

Hit me up if you want to build a 2000-era (V)LAN:

- XMPP Chat

- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)

Then let's game!

Dang, I think I lost my Kali [0] license-key. :p

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)

I spent an entire summer playing Warcraft 2 on Kali (before the Battle.net edition). What a memory and you are the first person to mention Kali in all the years since!

> as of January 2023, Kali.net offers the download and a registration code generator on the website, so registration is currently free.

thatspartlythejoke.jpg

Goatse... Ouch that brings back memories.

I tried googling for the original picture, but it's nowhere to be found.

Pity that such precious cultural artefacts are lost while poo sculptures are idolized.

Part of me says nothing of value was lost but you formulate it so eloquent that it is a shame that the cultural reference is lost

The original site is long gone, but the image still exists at similar URLs. Though from the description on KnowYourMeme, apparently no one has duplicated the original site, so there's a second image that has been forgotten.

It’s still around, I got inadvertently goatse’d this year (after not encountering the damned thing for 15 years)

The fact is that 99.99% of Internet users nowadays solely exist within sanitised content siloes, and that includes Google Search.

It is on the Wayback Machine (NSFW of course)

https://web.archive.org/web/19991111060504/http://www.goatse...

Back then you knew it was 'new guy time' when someone challenged them to look for Goatse, Lemon Party or Meatspin.

"[...] at one point they asked me to work a weekend and I already had plans, so they asked what it would take. I wanted a classic FIAT 500, so I named the price of the car: multiple thousands of pounds. The management said yes, it was their only option. So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done."

>Gen Z is just lazy, all it takes is standing straight and a firm handshake.

That's all it took for you!

Really enjoyed this

You're about 12 years older than me so the post was simultaneously nostalgic and a great insight into what work in our industry was like in the decade before I really got properly started professionally

Thanks for sharing and happy 50th for his year

The images really do seem like yesterday, not 25 years ago and could really fit nyc, Seattle, sf easily.

Just a testament to how much information we are now able to record starting 25 years ago.

Enormous monitors aside it's funny, even though more than a quarter of a century has passed, how contemporary those office scenes look. Even the on point trendiness of the "unfinished"/exposed industrial aesthetic really hasn't changed.

In recent years I've stepped into quite a lot of offices that look a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k. And, in fact, all of the trendier offices I've been in since I started work at around that time have looked a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k.

Why that strikes me as slightly odd is that if you rewound a further 26 years to 1974 I suspect things would probably look very different. And, of course, the past 26 years have had quite an impact on the way I look.

I notice the Cold Fusion book in the second photo didn't get a mention but I can't overstate: that was hot shit back then. If you knew Cold Fusion in 1999/2000 you could pretty much name your day rate contracting in the City of London. Sadly I did not know Cold Fusion and graduated into the ongoing dotcom crash during y2k so I took what I could get job-wise.

I've added a mention of the Cold Fusion book, with a little anecdote about its owner. Thanks for spotting it! I must have had something in my eye whilst looking at that photo.

Ah yes, back when caring about hardware was a thing.

Early 90s, new top-of-line Compaq arrives, for me, project manager. We open it to install network card - token ring (yes, it sucked to be you - you could almost see the little tokens slouching round the ring).

me: jesus, just look at that heat-sink!

male programmer: yeah, they really knocked it out with that anodised blue - can i get the next one?

female tech lead: you sad, sad bastards.

A mention of token ring made me look up Madge, but it seems like they, probably unsurprisingly, died in 2003.

Never heard of Madge before. AFAIK, our token ring networking (at a big 6 accountancy) was all supplied by IBM, but I could be wrong. In any case, I despised it for poor speed and reliability.

yeah, Madge was a (UK based) 2nd source of IBM Token Ring kit … MAUs, CAUs and so on iirc

much better determinism than Ethernet CSMA/CD

but also much slower - people tended to be interested in speed (and the price of the hardware) not determinism

yeah, then NatSemi integrated Ethernet onto a single chip and game over TR

All those gumdrop Macs sent me back to my time in a Flash cartoon shop that was filled with those things.

Why is the dentist chair hack not more of a thing?

I need it.

> at one point they asked me to work a weekend and I already had plans, so they asked what it would take. I wanted a classic FIAT 500, so I named the price of the car: multiple thousands of pounds. The management said yes, it was their only option. So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done.

Is this a joke?

and now thanks to outsourcing and AI no one can make a living this way again.

Please, just for this one thread, let's keep it on topic!

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