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A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

cameronsworld.net

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Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#51
post #32

Nice site. I was there, it wasn't that great, most of it was about Monty Python or how much people hated Barney the Dinosaur. The modern internet is much more expressive for a great many more people that geocities ever was.

I'm curious what you mean by "expressive". The modern internet is a far more consumer oriented experience than it was in the "old days", so I'm not quite sure what you mean.

[deleted]

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#52

Very cool. I think I had a couple of those images on my old Geocities website myself, although I did create a lot of my old images (badly) using Paint Shop Pro (I think) and Bryce for 3d landscape images.

Bryce! Holy shit what a nostalgia bomb. Creating guns and starships using only boolean primitives. It was so weird, and in the end, only landscapes came out beautiful. I wonder what happened to that.

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#54

This makes me oddly nostalgic for the days of painstakingly creating animated GIFs frame-by-frame. My animated GIF magnum opus, ca. 1996: https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/globe_spin3.gif

I just wanna say I love your site so much. Thank you for keeping some of the old internet alive by generating high-quality, free content instead of just aggregating it!

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern internet is much more expressive for a great many more people that geocities ever was. Geocities even constrained by the technology of the day offered far more expressiveness than Facebook’s “fill in these fields and we’ll populate a standard template” approach does.

The "modern internet" is more expressive in terms of content. It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture of university students or technologically savvy American nerds, and no longer limited only to what text and images can provide. Geocities, compared to modern platforms, offered more technical freedom in that it gave you direct control over HTML, CSS and Javascript, and yet still many Geocities sites wound…

It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture

On the contrary the Facebook of 2020 is far more a monoculture than the internet of 2000 or 1990.

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#56
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "modern internet" is more expressive in terms of content. It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture of university students or technologically savvy American nerds, and no longer limited only to what text and images can provide. Geocities, compared to modern platforms, offered more technical freedom in that it gave you direct control over HTML, CSS and Javascript, and yet still many Geocities sites wound…

It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture On the contrary the Facebook of 2020 is far more a monoculture than the internet of 2000 or 1990.

I wasn't referring to the culture of the platform, so much as the culture of the userbase.

Besides, Facebook is anything but a monoculture - nothing with a billion users could be considered a monoculture, especially not a platform where people maintain their real identity and culture rather than adopting a "platform" culture like on Reddit or 4chan.

Also, obviously, Facebook isn't the internet.

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#57
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a 3 MB web page. That would have taken about a minute to download with a fast modem. I used a download manager for stuff that large. Remember GetRight? 5/5 at Tucows!

Where were you getting anything close to that, outside of a T1 line? No matter what I did or where we lived, 56k dial up in practice was a consistent 3.2 kBps download. 128 kbps MP3s were always about 3.5 MB, which took about 20 minutes to download per track. I feel like those numbers will be burned in my brain for the rest of my life.

You're right of course, used kilobytes instead of kilobits. Thanks.

Re: A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

#60

This makes me oddly nostalgic for the days of painstakingly creating animated GIFs frame-by-frame. My animated GIF magnum opus, ca. 1996: https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/globe_spin3.gif

I just wanna say I love your site so much. Thank you for keeping some of the old internet alive by generating high-quality, free content instead of just aggregating it!

Oh, goodness me. Thank you for the unsolicited kind words. You've improved my previously gloomy mood.
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