Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

panix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–108 of 108 posts

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#101

Post by switchbak »

watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

"The 1990s were expensive and awkward" It was actually novel when you'd find a well written piece of software that did its job well and didn't crash (at least for me, being poor and stuck in the world of DOS/Windows). Things like AutoCAD that people used to do actual work. Early WordPerfect struck me as pretty good too.

I still resent Microsoft and particularly Gates for keeping the state of computing in the dark ages for so long. Using Linux (circa 96 or so) was such a revelation, it's hard to explain how massive the jump in capability was. That Microsoft went so long not even leveraging protected mode in commodity OSs (not NT) speaks volumes.

It is nice to reflect on how far we've come, but I also appreciate Alan Kay's perspective on things: that phone and iPad style environments are primarily designed for passive consumption, and we could do a lot more to empower the users of these devices. But still, we're absolutely light years ahead of where we were!

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#102

Post by jonhohle »

> A protocol will be developed for smaller interest groups to form larger common-interest federations.

How I wish this existed. Something like BBS and online forums, with the ability to create private channels with E2E encryption.

There’s probably no commercial viability, but the idea of a common interface for communities sounds awesome.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#103

Post by anthk »

JeremyNT wrote: post #94
watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

The rise of free software on the Internet indeed pleasantly surprised me as well. In '94 I was running some then-ancient - but still horrifically expensive - Mac, barely able to connect to a dial-up ISP on my ancient rural phone lines. The entire system was essentially impenetrable to me; I didn't even have any kind of concept of how I might write software for it and had no idea where to learn. The primitive tools I…

Similar to you but in 2001 with Windows 98 and Visual C++. I began to learn to code with C++ under Windows. The nightmares.

Resedit -> ResHacker

Apple Script -> VBScript

Now, heck, the OS for hackers (9front) it's dumb easier on design and C programming. And, before, Linux with {Perl and/or TCL}/TK made casual coding zillions times easier than Win32.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#104

Post by anthk »

switchbak wrote: post #101
watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

"The 1990s were expensive and awkward" It was actually novel when you'd find a well written piece of software that did its job well and didn't crash (at least for me, being poor and stuck in the world of DOS/Windows). Things like AutoCAD that people used to do actual work. Early WordPerfect struck me as pretty good too. I still resent Microsoft and particularly Gates for keeping the state of computing in the dark age…

You install a driver under Windows 98-> BSOD. It happened to me with he chipset ones. The official CD from the OEM.

On Linux distros and BSD's, a proper KDE setup from 3.5.10 times was light years ahead of Windows 98 and even Windows XP with Konqueror blending the file manager, the shell and the browser.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#105

Post by rconti »

doctor_eval wrote: post #49
rconti wrote: post #36

> I remember the first time I saw a URL address: http://www.something.something.something . "Ugh," I moaned. "A whole new language I have to learn? I was just getting the hang of Unix!" I immediately resigned myself to the fact that this might be the end of my days in cyberspace. The Net had become somewhat of a runaway locomotive and I was the woman running behind it, screaming for the conductor to please wait! Then…

Ha, my experience was quite similar. I was a Unix nerd and a big fan of Gopher, and when the WWW came along I had much the same reaction as TFA. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment with my laptop - I think - and scrolling through lynx while I endured a bout of chickenpox, many years ago. We eventually downloaded and built Mosaic for X-windows, and I still remember the look on my boss' face when we scrolled…

I'm probably only a couple years behind you, as my first shell access was '94 but I had no way to do graphical stuff. Eventually I installed Slackware disksets in '95 and could run Mosaic under X, but needless to say, 4MB of RAM was not really sufficient to do anything.

Funny, on that page there's also a quip about "why does everybody feel like their homepage need to have a 100kb image to slow down page loads to a crawl?"

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#106

Post by anthk »

msla wrote: post #99
watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

Dial-up was still the predominant mode of Internet access, to the point even Free Software was often sold in the form of people selling CD-ROMs because downloading a full Debian or Slackware install over an occasional bits per second connection was too painful to contemplate. Especially if the phone company demonstrated Quality by dropping your long-running connection. And that was assuming you had a CD-ROM drive. Ot…

Even in DVD times I bought the full Debian release on DVD. 4. 3 for binaries, 1 for the sources. 20 EUR (~$20). A bargain.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#107

Post by quickthrower2 »

brabel wrote: post #67
kristopolous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's in spec for the time. HTML 2.0 draft 00, November 1994: "2.14.1 Paragraph Level 0 The Paragraph element indicates a paragraph. The exact indentation, leading, etc. of a paragraph is not defined and may be a function of other tags, style sheets, etc. Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space of one line or half a line. This is typically not the case within the Address element and or is never the…

P is not so special, several HTML tags do not require a closing tag. I think it's even a mistake to close "br", "hr" for example? Even the MDN docs show "hr" examples without closing: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/hr Though they prefer to show "p" with closing tags (they mention it's optional though, and auto-close when one of several other tags are found: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-…

hr makes a lot of sense not to close. Does it ever have children?

br too.

p not closing feels a bit like a MS Word pilcro. In that regard I get it.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#108

Post by anthk »

jonhohle wrote: post #102

> A protocol will be developed for smaller interest groups to form larger common-interest federations. How I wish this existed. Something like BBS and online forums, with the ability to create private channels with E2E encryption. There’s probably no commercial viability, but the idea of a common interface for communities sounds awesome.

Private tildes (public Unix machines) with a federated Usenet service do exist. For private "channels", inner mail list with GPG integrated into Mutt. Solved.

https://tilde.club/

They have Usenet, mail, IRC and some sort of local (for use inside a single a server) and federated (the message from a user it's spread across all the federation) BBS'.

Post reply on HN