the internet i grew up with didn't exist yet
A retrospective of my time on the internet
51–60 of 317 posts
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#52Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward: We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat. It never left a mark, regardless of how…
I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#53Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward: We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat. It never left a mark, regardless of how…
TVs for consumers are sold at loss and the TV companies are making money with data and ads.
I guess the real price is 5-10x of what you pay. So only 10-20x more expensive for more apples to apples compariaon.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#54It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early. Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game. I a…
> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.
It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#55With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign. The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease. I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make…
This framing sets up variables incorrectly. People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day. People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier. There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.
>This framing sets up variables incorrectly.
What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?
For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'
Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#56Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward: We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat. It never left a mark, regardless of how…
There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#57The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#58> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95. In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive. It ran pretty well from what I recall.
Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#59I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each o…
The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#60It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.