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Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

retro.social

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Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#31

Post by rwmj »

jauco wrote: post #29

Actually, do things ever get easier to tinker with as technology matures? Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?

But this is about building radios, which is easier (probably?) now. You can drag and drop an FM radio in pure software (well, with a USB dongle). Or if you insist on hardware, use free tools and cheap PCB services to prototype your radio, grab the parts from Digikey and follow a Youtube tutorial to solder it all together.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#32

Post by mft_ »

jauco wrote: post #29

Actually, do things ever get easier to tinker with as technology matures? Is it easier to build or repair a radio now than it was when they were first sold? A computer? A car? A washing machine? A vacuum cleaner?

Yes, before the enshittification kicks in.

3D printers are mostly still repairable and far more reliable and usable than a few years ago when the majority of the hobby wasn’t making stuff, it was tuning the printer to work reliably. Bambu and California may be signalling that the enshittification inflection point is near.

Not quite the same level, but home/hobby electronics with tiny microcontrollers is more accessible than ever before thanks to the availability of cheap ESP8266/32 clones.

And there are some obvious individual counter-examples - Framework computers, or repairable blenders[0]… but you’ve got to pay a premium for the privilege.

But broadly you’re totally right - in the modern world, by the time something becomes a mainstream product aimed at general consumers, there’s a profit to be made and it’s likely on a downwards path.

[0] https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#33

Post by stuaxo »

JimDabell wrote: post #28
benj111 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 'real' web are you going to get on a 1.5in phone screen? What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places. Wap worked well for actually relaying information.

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was…

There were loads of Symbian/S60 phones with browsers.

2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time.

WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#34

Post by ghusto »

nadagast wrote: post #10

I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.

Another way of looking at it is that it made the "real" web shit.

The mobile-web world before the iPhone was one where mobile devices were second class citizens; desktop "real" websites first, and scaled down versions of those sites second (for mobile devices). The information itself was readily available to both, even if the presentation was lacking on the latter.

Jobs knew the only way to win was to not play the same game, because the open web is an even playing field. If you control a new platform on the other hand, you can't lose. So here we are, with locked down, dumbed down toys determining the standard.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#35

Post by JimDabell »

stuaxo wrote: post #33
JimDabell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was…

There were loads of Symbian/S60 phones with browsers. 2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time. WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.

I’m not saying the iPhone was the first phone with a web browser, I’m saying that it was the first phone with a web browser that was good enough for average people to want to use it.

Clients were lining up en masse for iPhone-compatible websites, but none of them ever cared about S60 compatibility.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#36

Post by decimalenough »

sznio wrote: post #21

> Making a website should be the easiest fucking thing in the world by now. There should be a program that you can use to spit out a website as easy as Word spits out words on paper squarespace? > and we - us fucking foss nerds or whoever - should've made it. wordpress?

but but WordPress is written in PHP screeeee

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#38

Post by nasretdinov »

stuaxo wrote: post #33
JimDabell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was…

There were loads of Symbian/S60 phones with browsers. 2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time. WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.

Symbian phones were also based on WebKit, however it wasn't nearly as usable due to many factors, mostly because it emulated mouse pointer (and you controlled it via the joystick) and didn't provide the pinch-to-zoom fluidity of the iPhone Safari. Also iPhone supported most of the major fonts used on the web, had font smoothing, etc. I've used both Symbian WebKit and Safari on first iPhone, and they aren't even close even though they're based on the same underlying browser tech.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#39

Post by easyThrowaway »

He's missing the last step:

Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.

Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.

But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#40

Post by lostlogin »

Retric wrote: post #12
nadagast wrote: post #10

I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.

It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception. That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.

> It was a bad phone

It got a bit of traction, I think they did ok.

Out of interest I checked. I live in New Zealand and iPhone revenue is about 60% more than my countries GDP.

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