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The History of the Dot Com Era

joshelman.medium.com

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#31

Post by Terretta »

Perhaps the dot com era is best understood as the gold rush tail of the personal computer then Internet boom.

For a feel of what lead into that, you could do worse than binging Halt and Catch Fire.

”Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

Was surprised this wasn’t mentioned in the media roundup, as it captures what it was like for me as part of this better than the documentaries I’ve seen.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#32

Post by noduerme »

hrh wrote: post #28
noduerme wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tole…

Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often. HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideologi…

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect.

I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for.

I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#33

Post by tome »

1cvmask wrote: post #30
noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

The part of the interview before this is great too but I've never been able to find it again. All the clips I can find are just this segment.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#34

Post by noduerme »

1cvmask wrote: post #30
noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited in ancient Greece. The problem is even if you had thousands of people at your disposal in the bronze age, how would you start building one from raw materials? I know, this all sounds like an old guy rant. The thing is, society has so quickly started taking these things for granted in my own lifetime - as Louis CK points out - it's unsafe. It's terrifying what would happen if they even had to reinvent one generation of knowledge.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#35

Post by DebtDeflation »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

>There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99.

I graduated college in 95. IMO, 97-99 was about people trying to get rich off of bullshit. The really fairy tale years were the pre-Netscape Navigator (late 94) era when Usenet and IRC ruled the roost.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#36

Post by ghaff »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

It probably went a bit longer than that. When I switched jobs in 2000, there were almost certainly some dark clouds on the horizon but there was still a lot of hiring going on in at least some quarters. 9/11 is the obvious end point (which is when I was laid off--and fortunately slid into another position that did go through hard times but was mostly good), although things were clearly on a big downward slide before that.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#37

Post by StevePerkins »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

This is an extraordinarily poor comment to see voted so high in the thread on HN.

The original author does not seem to have a "midlife crisis". They seem to have a spot of nostalgia for their first two or three years of real career after college.

They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc. They're simply noting that it was "a fun and wild time", and that some interesting stories are worth preserving since the time period is no longer native for the majority of the industry.

I'm not sure if you're projecting something yourself here, or if you're simply having a bad day.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#38

Post by ghaff »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #35
noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah 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 physic…

>There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. I graduated college in 95. IMO, 97-99 was about people trying to get rich off of bullshit. The really fairy tale years were the pre-Netscape Navigator (late 94) era when Usenet and IRC ruled the roost.

I guess it depends what you mean by fairy tale years. In the grand scheme of things, "no one" even had access to the Internet pre-Web.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#39

Post by ghaff »

Terretta wrote: post #31

Perhaps the dot com era is best understood as the gold rush tail of the personal computer then Internet boom. For a feel of what lead into that, you could do worse than binging Halt and Catch Fire . ”Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.” — https://en…

One aspect of the history of the era is that it was also a collision of the PC world and the Internet world which were largely isolated until the Web era. One was hobbyists with BBSs and then (disconnected) PCs in business. (Although the latter was uneven. I worked at a computer company and we used terminals until probably the early 90s.) And the Internet was largely academic until the Web.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#40

Post by noduerme »

ghaff wrote: post #38
DebtDeflation wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. I graduated college in 95. IMO, 97-99 was about people trying to get rich off of bullshit. The really fairy tale years were the pre-Netscape Navigator (late 94) era when Usenet and IRC ruled the roost.

I guess it depends what you mean by fairy tale years. In the grand scheme of things, "no one" even had access to the Internet pre-Web.

That's not true. I mean, I was gophering and FTP'ing and pirating all kinds of good stuff on a 2400 baud modem in 1992. By contrast, the guys I worked for in 1998 could barely use a computer. But boy could they sling bullshit to other people who couldn't use computers.
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