I miss /~username/ urls. Also that HTML! v6n1 January 1995 Best and Worst The Best and Worst of 1994 and Predictions for '95 by Eric Berlin ... No 's to be found :-)
[deleted]
The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#22Many people miss the early internet and say the magic has been lost. I get that feeling about bbs(es). When they started shutting down because of the internet magic was lost. The early internet was great but already too big.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was also the alt.scientology war.
Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.
Scientology holds their non-newbie teachings as, essentially, trade secrets. You only get to see them after you pay a lot of money to "advance" in their ranks. Somebody - presumably a disgruntled insider - started publishing some of their texts on alt.scientology. Scientology tried to stop them by automated (or very rapid human) cancels, with forged "from" fields. Posts on the board got "visited by the cancel bunny". Then people calling themselves "rabbit hunters" tried to figure out who was the source(s) of the cancel messages.
But it got knarlier than that. Scientology's texts were copyrighted; they had police seize the servers of people who put copies of the texts online.
Wired had a good write-up: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#24My first internet memory is around this time (1994/1995). I was a little kid and I thought I'd check out nasa's website at nasa.com to see some cool space photos - whoops!
Someone had camped that domain (The actual one being nasa.gov) for porn.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#25They failed to mention (in either the best or worst column, YMMV) alt.binaries.tasteless and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
Well, I could have finished uni a lot quicker without knowing about them.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#26This excerpt is sure to provoke some opinions:
> Worst: Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#27I remember watching the Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter : that was one of the earliest interesting “live” things I remember seeing on the internet, via Mosaic on my little Slackware Linux workstation at the local university. That was pretty cool. I often remember it when I’m watching current astronomy events unfold live: probes launch or land on mars, or data releases from telescopes.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#28I'm amazed how close we came to the CLIPPER chip. That would have undermined literally everything digital. Thanks to everyone who helped kill that.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#29Unbelievably the link for the remote robot arm:
Remote Robot Arm (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au)
Still resolves to a website related to the project
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#30> There's not much that's bad on the Net Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet. I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the wo…
The bar for getting online is so much different we just get a full cross section of society. Many homeless people have internet access via a smartphone today, and in the 90s it was basically just upper middle class, rich people, and university students.
The technical bar was higher - the article itself had notable people seemingly proud of (with a little trauma?) getting their SLIP connections working. And how that itself seemed a step up towards greater access. Pretty sure namby pamby PPP was my first connection hehe