The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
panix.comI'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions.
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.
I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete.
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.
It depends. 4 years later, you could get:
- 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.
This post chronicles the cost of early computing hardware over time, and you're absolutely right about how expensive things used to be: https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/
I agree, the churn, as I experienced it, lasted until 2010 or so. My last CPU, an AMD FX-8350, is a 2012 model, and I still use it for gaming in my main PC. Before that, new tech was a must every 3-5 years or so.
"The 1990s were expensive and awkward" <= this is what folks that didn't experience it don't realize. It wasn't just an earlier time with slower CPUs, computers were pretty trash at the time, peripherals sucked, the connectors sucked, everything crashed all the time, software quality was crap, and things were outrageously expensive. Oh and they had a lifetime of a couple years before they felt unbearably slow compared to the new expensive and faster crappy products.
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!
You install a driver under Windows 98-> BSOD. It happened to me with he chipset ones. The official CD from the OEM.
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.
The rise of free software on the Internet indeed pleasantly surprised me as well.
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.
Similar to you but in 2001 with Windows 98 and Visual C++. I began to learn to code with C++ under Windows. The nightmares.
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.
> Linux in every other pocket
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.
That's because connecting to the internet was a rare, deliberate action for most people and not the default state of every electronic device.
Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.
Termux was nerfed in Android 12. See https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2366
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.
Dial-up was still the predominant mode of Internet access, to the point even Free Software was often sold in the form of people selling CD-ROMs because downloading a full Debian or Slackware install over an occasional bits per second connection was too painful to contemplate. Especially if the phone company demonstrated Quality by dropping your long-running connection.
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?
Even in DVD times I bought the full Debian release on DVD. 4. 3 for binaries, 1 for the sources. 20 EUR (~$20). A bargain.
>The 1990s were expensive and awkward.
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.
> I remember the first time I saw a URL address: http://www.something.something.something. "Ugh," I moaned. "A whole new language I have to learn? I was just getting the hang of Unix!" I immediately resigned myself to the fact that this might be the end of my days in cyberspace. The Net had become somewhat of a runaway locomotive and I was the woman running behind it, screaming for the conductor to please wait! Then suddenly it all came together. A Net guru friend told me about Lynx. "All you have to do," he said, "is type the word 'lynx' at your Unix prompt, and presto! You're into the Web." That weekend I spent about eight hours a day exploring. I quickly found out that you could access all your favorite telnet, FTP, and Gopher sites from the Web, as well as tons of resources you would never find anywhere else on the Net. My cyberlife had changed forever.
Fantastic.
Ha, my experience was quite similar. I was a Unix nerd and a big fan of Gopher, and when the WWW came along I had much the same reaction as TFA. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment with my laptop - I think - and scrolling through lynx while I endured a bout of chickenpox, many years ago.
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.
I'm probably only a couple years behind you, as my first shell access was '94 but I had no way to do graphical stuff. Eventually I installed Slackware disksets in '95 and could run Mosaic under X, but needless to say, 4MB of RAM was not really sufficient to do anything.
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?"
> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas.
Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.
Much worse than that: cancels were unauthenticated. Anyone could cancel anything, and it was up to individual NNTP servers to decide whether to respect it or not. Usually they had some level of whitelisting to prevent total anarchy, but it was definitely a problem. NNTP was a true decentralized system, and people trying to build decentralized social media and discussion platforms really should learn from all the problems it never managed to solve.
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
When I was about 11, I remember I asked for disk images of Logo for Apple ][ or something along those lines on Usenet.
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.
And the human moderators.
It was also the alt.scientology war.
Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.
Scientology holds their non-newbie teachings as, essentially, trade secrets. You only get to see them after you pay a lot of money to "advance" in their ranks. Somebody - presumably a disgruntled insider - started publishing some of their texts on alt.scientology. Scientology tried to stop them by automated (or very rapid human) cancels, with forged "from" fields. Posts on the board got "visited by the cancel bunny". Then people calling themselves "rabbit hunters" tried to figure out who was the source(s) of the cancel messages.
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/
If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace!
Great info.
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".
Yep, a real photo. Unfortunately, I participated in the making of that sign. It was made at a sign company in Oakland, CA that is owned and operated by Scientologists.
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.
Around that time, I was working tech support at an ISP and our NNTP server went down - I got a call from a customer who was worried their posts on alt.scientology had caused a DOS attack. Checked some things, oops, no, we had just run out of disk space. Got the sysadmins to clear up some space and the customer was soon back at their flame war. :-D
I miss /~username/ urls.
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 :-)
That's in spec for the time. HTML 2.0 draft 00, November 1994:
"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...
P is not so special, several HTML tags do not require a closing tag. I think it's even a mistake to close "br", "hr" for example?
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...)
hr makes a lot of sense not to close. Does it ever have children?
br too.
p not closing feels a bit like a MS Word pilcro. In that regard I get it.
I remember learning `<P>` this way in 1994. (And it was awhile before I saw `</LI>` end tags.)
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...
Like the optional semicolon in JS. I am a semicolon guy (and general unfan of JS tricks and shortcuts) but plenty of people prefer not to have them!
> No </P>'s to be found :-)
Vaguely related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694849 ("Write HTML Right", ~2 months ago, 205 comments)
I encountered this recently! I was looking at the source of a Maciej Cegłowski article on his idlewords.com site, and was perplexed at why </p> omitted. I had no idea it was valid HTML :)
it's funny that web browsers parse Ps in there
> There's not much that's bad on the Net
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?
The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.
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.
> The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.
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.
The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure.
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 internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure. [...] 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)
*one decade
> life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world
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?
I think most of today's problems are due to failures of the consensus in the 90s and 00s. The consensus interfered in Russia's 1996 presidential election (alienating Russia from the western world), allowed China to join the WTO on the assumption that capitalism would eventually lead to democracy in China and invaded Iraq in the name of spreading liberal democracy. The consensus also stood by and did nothing or even cheered as corporations shipped working class people's jobs to countries where they could pay next to nothing and decided that they were "multinational" with no loyalty whatsoever to their home country.
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.
>> 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
What? Life was certainly worse in the 1990s compared to today on almost all axes except for how much people complain about it online.
It is better in some things and worse in others. It was better in some places and it's now worse in others. Why does every comment about how some things are getting worse has to be met with the same "rational optimism" automatic response?
Some of us actually remember the 90s, and not this nostalgia-tinged "hey I was young and had no responsibilities so it was better." It's not like I lived in some third-world hellhole. I lived in Los Angeles. Murder rates were quadruple what they are today. Gang violence was totally out of control. Every single night there'd be some story on the news of a girl getting shot while standing in line at an ice cream truck. Always an ice cream truck. The LA Riots happened, and unlike what people in the US call a "riot" today when a window get smashed and trash cans are lit on fire, 63 people died. The LAPD was in the middle of the Rampart Scandal, planting evidence left and right and brutalizing people. My middle school got shot at in drive-bys three separate times while I was there. A black girl in my neighborhood was tied to a fence and burned alive. We weren't allowed to wear red or blue because the school district was so afraid of us getting shot. Medical care was so great that my best friend died from touching a cat when she was 12. Teachers were still getting fired for being gay. Guys like Matthew Shepard were getting tortured and beaten to death. Freedom of expression so great that 2 Live Crew was getting banned by US district courts and the Satanic Panic was still happening in a lot of places. AIDS was still scary as hell and not easily manageable with known medication. We were getting malathion dumped on us from the sky all the damn time because of Mediterranean fruit fly infestations.
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.
Certainly "There were few real problems in the world" is such a naive and irrationally nostalgic take that it absolutely deserves criticism? (One datapoint: the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994.)
Oh, I misread it, I thought GGP meant the other way around x)
Just as naive as 'the 90's was certainly worse.'
Were you in Rwanda in '94?
Yes you are absolutely right. Even after a worldwide pandemic life expectancy and living standards are better everywhere.
The 1994 Wired article in which Godwin introduces the concept of Internet memes and recounts engineering the Nazi-comparison "counter-meme" is a short, intriguing read, with many quotes that are interesting and/or amusing to review in today's context: https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...
The bar for getting online is so much different we just get a full cross section of society. Many homeless people have internet access via a smartphone today, and in the 90s it was basically just upper middle class, rich people, and university students.
The technical bar was higher - the article itself had notable people seemingly proud of (with a little trauma?) getting their SLIP connections working. And how that itself seemed a step up towards greater access. Pretty sure namby pamby PPP was my first connection hehe
Consider that “Don’t ask don’t tell” was a progressive policy in 1994, and reassess whether even in the US things were better for most people then than they are now.
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.
There's so many good quotes in this but this might be my favorite:
> 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.
>Nethack. A dungeon-exploration game to which even non-Dungeons and Dragons fanatics can become addicted. Every adventure game has monsters and magic items, but Nethack has so many monsters, magic items, puzzling situations, and amazing secrets that you'll completely forget about the ASCII graphics. It's the most complex and thought-intensive adventure you'll experience on the Net (to access Nethack, FTP to linc.cis.upenn.edu /pub/NH3.1/binaries; also read rec.games.roguelike.nethack).
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
> Two new standards; the first for dial-in users, the second for commerce.
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.
Ah, #jeopardy brings back a lot of great memories. Met a lot of great people back in the day playing that on irc.
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.
> This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world's leaders, politicians, and CEOs.
Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...
It appears to be the same newsletter, just renamed: https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/
This excerpt is sure to provoke some opinions:
> 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.
I feel like the prediction came true but without any government intervention required.
That happened with Spain and Telefonica, the state phone/telco company.
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.
Many people miss the early internet and say the magic has been lost. I get that feeling about bbs(es). When they started shutting down because of the internet magic was lost. The early internet was great but already too big.
Apparently “worst of internet” was… “The organization of the World-Wide Web. I love the Web, but finding something specific on it is a nightmare. And because the Web is growing by leaps and bounds, I just don't see things getting easier anytime soon.”
Made me smile... especially the last line. :)
Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994?
> 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.
"Smart Agents" that will do their owners' bidding where all the rage then. The idea was you'd have this autonomous software robots that would go around searching for information (or do whatever else) you needed on the internet.
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 :-)
The "without the user knowing the source" is an interesting part. Given some popular movements in North America right now you could have ended up with interesting answers for "Who won the 2024 election?", "Is JFK Jr alive?" or "Who is the Head of State in Canada", with a very authoritative-looking Google stamp of approval on it.
Unbelievably the link for the remote robot arm:
Remote Robot Arm (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au)
Still resolves to a website related to the project
Very cool!
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."
> A protocol will be developed for smaller interest groups to form larger common-interest federations.
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.
Private tildes (public Unix machines) with a federated Usenet service do exist. For private "channels", inner mail list with GPG integrated into Mutt. Solved.
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'.
I remember watching the Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter : that was one of the earliest interesting “live” things I remember seeing on the internet, via Mosaic on my little Slackware Linux workstation at the local university. That was pretty cool. I often remember it when I’m watching current astronomy events unfold live: probes launch or land on mars, or data releases from telescopes.
The calm before the storm of the web taking over everything. Interesting to remember how big MUDs were, or gopher, usenet, FTP, etc.
>Best public display/demo of the Internet: The Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter
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.
So little has changed.
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.
My first internet memory is around this time (1994/1995). I was a little kid and I thought I'd check out nasa's website at nasa.com to see some cool space photos - whoops!
Someone had camped that domain (The actual one being nasa.gov) for porn.
>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).
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.
> Digital cash will bring home shopping and pay-per-view to the Internet, as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion.
Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions
Microtransactions for content are never going to take off because of the friction and the potential for microfraud.
openseas.com
> as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion.
Well atleast cryptocurrencies solved that.
They failed to mention (in either the best or worst column, YMMV) alt.binaries.tasteless and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
Well, I could have finished uni a lot quicker without knowing about them.
I'm amazed how close we came to the CLIPPER chip. That would have undermined literally everything digital. Thanks to everyone who helped kill that.
Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"?
I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.
CLIPPER was encryption. I don’t remember anything about remote kill switches for media (sounds too advanced for 1994), but there was also discussion in the 1990s about the V-chip, which was parental controls for broadcast TV. The technology was implemented but never amounted to much. Turns out parents weren’t any better at programming their TVs than they were their VCRs.
Things were symmetrically encrypted, but the government had an additional decrypt key for EVERY chip made.
> Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game.
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.
The best part? Nethack still is relevant and IMHO still one of the better video games you can play on the internet. Played it in the 90s, played it off and on again ever since, including this week!
And Slashem, because of new roles/races/tecniques/maps/objects.
But the worst offense is that AOL, like other major on-line services, is taking from the Internet without giving back.
Replace AOL here with some other big internet companies I don’t have to name and it’s the same story
The 90s in the internet were awesome. I loved to surf it with my Red Hat or Slackware using lynx and netscape and feel like a real hacker <3
I still use Lynx and Links for that, but with Puffy OS on a netbook :).
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
“Best Usenet thread:
Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups”
Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.
I believe a bunch of Usenet archives are available for download from archive.org. I remember when google gobbled up dejanews but I think that’s no longer online?
I had a moment like that seeing this very real newspaper snippet from 1912: https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/photos/a.220359...
"This effect may be considerable in a few centuries", indeed
Books about the internet, for sale (only) by email/phone/mail order, brilliant.
1994 was one of the best years in my life. Sex drugs and Techno. Love Parade, clubbing, being young. If I could turn back time.. If I could find a way.