The History of the Dot Com Era
joshelman.medium.com
The History of the Dot Com Era
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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#2IMHO the Dot Com era never ended, much like the cold war never did. These just come out in waves. The today "dot com" bubble of ridiculously expensive bullshit IT companies can well burst one day as well.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#3I highly recommend the documentary "Riot On!". Great documentary, great cinema, and great entertainment. "E-Dreams" and "Startup.com" are also very good. All of them on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#4Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings.
Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physical servers or prepaying for bandwidth. If you dream of it, you can make it. There are literally children playing with neural network APIs in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. They're going to produce some amazing software.
Me - I'm a bit of a 90s dot-com casualty, secure in a career but lost the move fast and break things mentality awhile ago. I make sure to keep myself up to date. Part of it's just keeping your mind alive to new ideas.
There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing. The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; that doesn't mean it isn't the font of creativity. We get old but the things we build survive in new forms.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#5The Internet History Podcast is excellent :
http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/
It was created while writing the book 'How the Internet Happened' which is referenced.
The episodes on how Google got to Adwords and the episodes on browser development are particularly good.
It's a real treasure trove.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#6IMHO the Dot Com era never ended, much like the cold war never did. These just come out in waves. The today "dot com" bubble of ridiculously expensive bullshit IT companies can well burst one day as well.
Will burst. But probably not for a year or two. The current hyped up everything + large scale money printing by the EU + US makes me want to put actual gold bars under my bed.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#7Funnily enough I was looking for an article I read about a public figure and the website is long gone. Fortunately there was a copy on Archive.org but it really made me long for the days when the world and their dog felt excited enough to create websites that weren't commercial, weren't laden with ads, they were just labours of love.
There were fan websites, sometimes linked together in web rings (I loved web rings) or listed on Yahoo!
There were hobby/enthusiast websites where people would share information for the hell of it. I still miss those days.
What I don't miss are the perpetual "under construction" gifs but the current web is so corporate and so ad infested/hostile.
Yes, we now have Youtube videos on every conceivable subject but I can't help but think we've lost something along the way.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#8I moved to San Francisco in 2001 to go be part of the Dot Com boom as well, but arrived at the very end. I came out fine, but went through a period over a year or so where I'd join a company, a month or two later they would close, and the same thing repeated five or six times before I switched to the video game industry for a bit.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#9Having been part of it, and knowing two survivors from the inside, Altitude Software and OutSystems, I am feeling the midlife crisis as well.
Specially when I also realize most of our juniors weren't even around when I was playing with this new software development stack made available to selected MSFT partners.
Re: The History of the Dot Com Era
#10I moved to San Francisco in 2001 to go be part of the Dot Com boom as well, but arrived at the very end. I came out fine, but went through a period over a year or so where I'd join a company, a month or two later they would close, and the same thing repeated five or six times before I switched to the video game industry for a bit.
SOMA in 2001 had tumbleweeds blowing down the street, and you could park on the sidewalk and there was nobody to notice.