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Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

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Unless I'm old at 25: bullshit.

The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC.

I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.

Actually that would be a good behavioral question for a job interview. "How often do you use IRC" - says alot about the person....

I've taken to using private Skype rooms a lot (which is an underutilized resource and, incidentally, can be monetized for niche markets)

Yeah, I realized the other day that in a year or two I'll have been using IRC for half my life. Not adult life mind, my whole life. That would be impressive ...were I old.

I came on the scene around the time IM and web-based chat rooms (arguably) peaked; 2000. In the 'FOSS' world, aside from mailing lists, IRC was the dominant means of communication.

I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios.

I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.

yep. for some context:

One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?”

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention.

I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).

I know not everybody is a nostalgic nerd with a thing for tech industry history, but, yeah, I'm two years younger and even I was aware of the general history of Netscape's journey and choices by the time I was 14-15.

Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)

I thought about this a little more.. I think the reason I find it so hard to believe is because of the MS antitrust trial. It was a huge thing at the time and Netscape was a big part of it... so unless you were completely oblivious to computers and the internet, it would be hard to not know about Netscape.

Strictly speaking, however, there is a difference between knowing about Netscape and knowing what they were doing. Myself, I used Netscape software daily between 1996 and 2000 something but can't say I really knew what the company was doing. Sure, I know all about that they released a web browser for free, but I have no real idea (without looking it up on Wikipedia) what they really did for their shareholders.

So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.

I'm more like: sooo, this dude didn't know crap about the internet and launched one of the biggest websites in the world. #fml

this is what I was thinking too. maybe this explains why it was written in PHP? :)

No. I have no numbers, but I'd say we're looking at 80-90% of all websites written in dorm rooms in 2003 were written in PHP. Most of the rest in classic ASP (which was barely 'classic' yet in 2003).

For scale, Rails was released in June 2004, four months after Facebook's launch.

Python was even seen as esoteric back then.

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

not that hard to believe. I am 20 now, and I didn't even know much about iPhone when it launched. All I thought about it was that its just another super expensive phone, like one of Nokia's luxury phone. Coz I wasn't interested to these things at the time, and well, I wasn't paying attention.

A more apt comparison would be if you didn't know about the iPhone now. This conversation between Zuckerberg and Andreessen didn't happen right when Netscape came out.

well, there is now way for me to do a comparison using my knowledge about iPhone if I didn't about iPhone today, isn't it? :)

Misunderstand the quote more?

He's asking what netscape the group, as in the people building the software did, not what the software did.

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