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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

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

#41

Post by Shorel »

> Two new standards; the first for dial-in users, the second for commerce.

The two standards are more and more different each year XD

Public IP addresses, for example. Big sites have public routeable IPs, end users are behind one or more levels of NAT. You have to pay extra money to be able to be able to open ports 80/443.

> All data are Mosaic. What is it about the World-Wide Web that makes everyone want to stick 100-K pictures on their home pages? Add that to the incredible inefficiencies and poor designs of the Gopher and HTTP (WWW) protocols and we see another generation of computing resources torpedoed by the enthusiasm and poor programming of graduate students.

Now even the programming languages and runtimes are Web-based! Inefficiencies are compound.

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

#43

Post by watersb »

sbf501 wrote: post #28

I'm amazed how close we came to the CLIPPER chip. That would have undermined literally everything digital. Thanks to everyone who helped kill that.

Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"?

I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.

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

#44

Post by nl »

icelancer wrote: post #40
bdw5204 wrote: post #5

> 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…

>> 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 world What? Life was certainly worse in the 1990s compared to today on almost all axes except for how much people complain about it online.

Yes you are absolutely right. Even after a worldwide pandemic life expectancy and living standards are better everywhere.

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

#45

Post by Anunayj »

yread wrote: post #42

> Digital cash will bring home shopping and pay-per-view to the Internet, as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions

> as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Well atleast cryptocurrencies solved that.

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

#46

Post by quickthrower2 »

kristopolous wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

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 :-)

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…

Like the optional semicolon in JS. I am a semicolon guy (and general unfan of JS tricks and shortcuts) but plenty of people prefer not to have them!

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

#47

Post by watersb »

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 30 pounds and another $1000 for the docking stations and mice and ergonomic plastic monitor stands and Ethernet AUI for your 10BASE-5 Local Area Network.

JPEG was not yet a thing. [edit: yes, it was; Netscape Navigator shipped with JPEG support in December 1994. But that's before this original article was released.]

Shareware. I actually paid for a license for PKZip!

And I bought a Netscape license too -- I think it was 2.0, it was $40. That was their business model: sell browser software. The server happened the following year.

NeXTStep Developer License was $3000 per year. Windows MSDN was not free, either. I paid for a $2000 annual subscription at least once.

Linux was shaping up remarkably quickly, a rallying point for open source userland tools... but BSDi wasn't free. Any other UNIX was thousands of dollars -- that Open Group industry model.

The 1990s were expensive and awkward.

I am utterly stunned that it all turned out as well as it has: NeXTStep in every pocket, and Linux in every other pocket, and most tools are free, the Internet everywhere, and strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.

It's not perfect but it was going to be so much worse.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by doctor_eval »

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 down in an article about Shoemaker–Levy and there was a photo of it hitting Jupiter. He nearly fell off his chair.

So, I suppose that means I've been on the Internet for at least 28 years... ugh.

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

#50

Post by fritztastic »

andai wrote: post #33
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".…

If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

Great info.

That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".

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