Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs (apparently I'm one)?
It was a series of comics aimed at people who work in IT. You might have come across some of their sketches without realising it.
www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
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Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#12I must have re-read this site multiple times over... still go back every now and again... looks like it is archived though. First post: https://web.archive.org/web/20220225094808/http://ars.userfr...
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#13A webcomic that started back when mid-sized US/Canadian towns really did have one-stop ISPs that employed both experienced sysadmins, the new web designers doing sites for local businesses, and students just getting started in IT - and were places where all of the above could actually advance or at
least enjoy their careers, not just languish as call center drones.
I was lucky enough to spend a couple of summers in high school then after my freshman year of college working at a similar outfit in my hometown. It had about 1500 subscribers paying about $20-30/mo for dialup around 1997-99.
Anyway, that’s where I was introduced to User Friendly, and we’d laugh together over the funnier ones.
Go to “Storylines” to find the ones you remember: https://web.archive.org/web/20220225091648/http://www.userfr...
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#14Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs (apparently I'm one)?
It was often hilarious if you happened to work at a local ISP in the era the comic was started (late 90s), back when $20-30/mo for dialup was a good deal, and customers could drop their computers off to have their modems and Netscape installed and Windows configured to dial in. Or for $40 extra, have some high school kid working there drop by :)
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#15Sad to see it go, I would read it daily even the repeats.
I did buy one of the books years ago. Maybe other books were release since :) Will have to look
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#16I still have my "lifetime" User Friendly membership card signed by Illiad and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell, a User Friendly Guide to World Domination" from O'Reilly. I wish I had found a copy of the first UF compilation book, and that my copy of "Ten Years of UserFriendly.org" hadn't been destroyed in a move.
For those of us who have been doing this for a very long time, User Friendly was the salve to the dry business side of Dilbert. Think the xkcd tech support cheat sheet (https://xkcd.com/627/) but with far more snark and characters.
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#17Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs (apparently I'm one)?
User Friendly was the first big web-comic, the first to establish the idea of a web-comic as a primary medium, as opposed to being adapted from another source (newspapers) or intellectual property. It started in 1997 which was really early in Internet time, around the peak of the dial-up era (and the setting is a workplace of a dial-up ISP.) It may not have quite been the first web-comic, but it was the one that first reached a critical mass of general notability in geek culture.
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#18I still have my "lifetime" User Friendly membership card signed by Illiad and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell, a User Friendly Guide to World Domination" from O'Reilly. I wish I had found a copy of the first UF compilation book, and that my copy of "Ten Years of UserFriendly.org" hadn't been destroyed in a move. For those of us who have been doing this for a very long time, User Friendly was the salve to the dry busines…
Dilbert was a lot more generic too. I think most companies reflected Dilbert in one way or another. But User Friendly was a lot more specialised.
At least that’s how I remembered them.
Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#19Re: www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
#20Wow, one of the originals from the Precambrian era of the web.
I have a vague recollection that User Friendly started publishing on an OS/2 Warp fan site sometime around 1995-96.
(Edit: on quick googling, I'm probably wrong and confusing it with something else from that era.)