Yes, but because it was completely pre-enshitification internet, with so much hope and promise to be something good for everyone.
It was kinda shit but it was shit because it was shit. It was improving every day and the sky was the limit.
Thats what I miss most about the past. The feeling of hope. Things would get better. Tomorrow was a bright place.
The continuous improvement is what I remember the most! At least how I remember the internet of old, it was like a constant stream of something new, from random funny links of random sites, to big new major projects surfacing. It was cool
Anyone, could throw up a website and get hits, and feel like the world gave a damn. Remember when your site visit counter was THE coolest part of your little site??
Yeah, it was a pretty fun time, before the feeling that everything had to be owned by a mega corporation that would wring every drop off cash out of it.
I distinctly remember the 90s internet. It was a paradise.
Yeah, man, I was so full of hope and so excited about the possibilities.
I was going to say something similar. Stuff ran slow because of slow processing not because of a shit load of overhead like now bad webui and stuff.
Internet? You are a baby! In my days we had to bring our floppies and the day we were able to run that banner making software my life changed.
I was responding to the days of the picture. I started with computers in high school the late 70s, and got my CS degree in 85. I spent a lot of time on the Internet before there was a worldwide web.
Pre Internet
Well, pre-WWW. There was internet, but you had to use telnet and remote into computers. Lots of bulletin board systems.
Yep BBS. So much of Halt and Catch Fire hit home.
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode’s trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode’s trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
I too miss the day when the internet was for geeks and nerds, (and anyone who wasn’t never left MySpace). Now everyone is online, and the novelty has been ruined. Not to mention how much more centralized the internet is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Everyone visits the same five websites/apps now.
The barrier to entry was real, I had to figure out how to write a dialup script for my first PC to connect to the internet I purchased from the local high school. I didn’t go there, that was just the only place in town with enough internet to resell.
It’s good that everyone has access to information now. The impact it’s had on visual arts and music really can’t be overstated, it allows artists to reach their fans directly which is incredible. But it was a different place when everyones grandma wasn’t reading Breitbart and repeating it on social media.
I agree the centralization of everyone on a handful of sites is an issue, it makes it too easy to manipulate and rig. I feel like social media was an incredible mistake but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle.
I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode’s trashcan opinions on social media
That’s on you. Social media is not a necessity, it’s actually pretty simple to avoid.
not watching those low IQ chode’s trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.
Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, and Bill Clinton predate social media.
Bill Clinton predate social media
Still alive.
So? He was elected in 1992. Social media had nothing to do with it.
So?
So words matter, buddy.
Predate doesn’t only mean that someone lived and died before something else. I predate combined Taco Bell/KFC/Pizza Huts Kentaco Huts, but I’m also still living. Like Bill.
So do points, you should find one
You cheer up, pal. You’re bad for the climate.
The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn’t feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It’s been said before but bears repeating: “The Internet was a place.” It didn’t follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren’t supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that’s what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide…
I miss computer time being something special.
It is special again - when you switch from your phone to the computer :D
And you install Linux
Yes and no.
Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.
But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…
By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.
Oddly, I want the CRT’s, but those optiplexes are horrible.
I just want one crt per system for retro gaming.
I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously … and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process … thanks to Microsoft.
I administered windows w/netware and zen …. The frustration it could cause but when it all worked it was a sight to behold
Yeah, NetWare and Zen with NAL in full flight was a thing to behold. Instead we got Active Directory.
I got to use my Netware 4.x admin certification a little while ago. A new customer was having a tangential problem that I overheard, they were still running Netware and couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So I showed them some things and quickly admonished them to get anything newer.
I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.
Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I’m more experienced and well traveled or whatever.
I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I’m a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D
I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.
I used to think so too. Turns out a lot of nerds were just one culture-war grievance away from going full Nazi.
Yeah :(
The Internet was for anybody. I think it was a mistake to foist it on everybody.
I don’t miss the misogyny. It’s still around but not as acceptable generally, and easier to find other women now.
Or when “bad”, a hell of a lot more entertaining, like Archimedes Plutonium for example.
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I don’t know if I miss this or if I miss being young but yes.
Maybe I just miss using a computer without ads all over the place.
Oh, I have so many adblockers on now, lol.
You and me both. Back in the days of that photo I only ever saw this many ads when I downloaded something particularly sketchy.
Remember the porn pop-ups?
I’ve been meaning to explore Gopher and Gemini. Maybe this meme is the spark I needed.
The computers were always slow. SSDs are a wonderful thing as are multicore processors.
But I miss when I had a positive view of tech.
I still have a positive view of the technology, it’s the people who demand that they control every aspect of it that I’m weary of.
I’ll never forget booting into an SSD for the first time on my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was absolutely mind-blowing how much faster it was. A few weeks later I upped the RAM to 16gb and it was like I was carrying a supercomputer.
Yeah, SSDs are one of the biggest innovations in computer speed in my memory. That, and actual good internet. I was raised with dial-up and HDDs, though I remember my dad coding (and playing things) with MS-DOS before I was old enough to understand it. I fully remember going to a game site and loading up a 2MB Adobe Flash game. I had time to go make a sandwich while it downloaded.
I had lots of games individually bookmarked, because it saved a lot of time compared to waiting like 30 seconds for each page to load. If I only bookmarked the site’s landing page, I would have to wait for the welcome page to load, then the Games section to load, then the first page of the Action Games genre to load, then the second page of the Action Games section to load, before I could finally get to my game. Even skipping those four or five pages and going directly to the game page could easily save a solid 2-3 minutes of waiting.
Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.
All nighter Doom sessions for me. IT would delete it each day, and we would just copy it back via ftp from our Unix accounts.
Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?
Uh, yes?
all of those things were beautiful. all long gone now.
Computers were still exciting. And hadn’t been enshitified.
lel
One to the left too. Cheap edit.
All of them, CRTs can’t do black this deep in a room as bright as this
I figured this was some funny attempt at anonymization, even though everyone has their backs turned to the camera.
As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don’t miss those old ball mice.
You would’ve liked me then. I would scrape that stuff off just as a weird stim toy type activity.
That third wheel was a bit more annoying since it was on a spring and therefore harder to scrape.
Just have to press down and scrape sideways. Optical mice rule.
Yeah, just a much lengthier process.
The worst are the spots that didn’t build up as much, the large clumps would pop off as a whole. But even a small dot of gunk could make the ball slip or wobble.
oh man optical mice and lcds was the best thing ever for IT. I got everyone in my family optical mice one xmass when they got pretty cheap and when people just did not realize how much a quality of life improvement they were. I think I included a mouse pad that was a good surface in case they had a desk with little contrast. Then at work I was pushing conversion to lcd and sunsetting crts so hard.
The place I worked for had the contract for all school computers in our part of the state. After two years or so of buying huge numbers of mice because the teachers couldn’t be bothered to keep the kids from stealing or throwing the balls from the mice we started using epoxy to glue in the balls. The teachers immediately started complaining about the kids complaining about it. I was out of that part of IT when Optical mice became more common but I’m sure it was a great relief to those that were still maintaining that pile.
I assume your talking you glued the plastic that held the ball in the mouse because at first read it sounds like you glued the ball and im like. Yeah I bet there would be complaints :)
No we did not glue the ball. Why would anyone consider that a solution?
yeah it just sounded like it initially while reading your comment. It was sorta funny to visualize.
We just glued the cover in place. It made cleaning them difficult but the guy that ran the company came up with a way to do it quickly in bulk. On the next contract they put provisions in on peripherals and the problem became the schools problem. They quickly determined they could do something about their students behavior.
