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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

#51

Post by StanislavPetrov »

>The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000).

ICS was fantastic back in the day (shout out to FICS that has been great since 1998 and still going). I'll never forget being logged into ICS on 9/11 while watching the towers get hit and chatting on there with different people around the country and the world stunned at what was going on.

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

#52

Post by eafkuor »

Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994?

> Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.

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

#53

Post by senko »

eafkuor wrote: post #52

Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994? > Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.

"Smart Agents" that will do their owners' bidding where all the rage then. The idea was you'd have this autonomous software robots that would go around searching for information (or do whatever else) you needed on the internet.

In terms of technical description, they were closer to today's web3 smart contracts than how Google works.

In the end, nothing came of all that hype tho. Turns out it was easier to build Google :-)

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

#54

Post by andrepd »

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.

It is better in some things and worse in others. It was better in some places and it's now worse in others. Why does every comment about how some things are getting worse has to be met with the same "rational optimism" automatic response?

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

#55

Post by senko »

echelon wrote: post #20
antod wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world. Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms. Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on ea…

The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure. Sure, lots of people were using it. But many of them couldn't openly advertise their feelings or form social groups. It was a domain of the technical and the young. There won't be anything else like that feeling.

> The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure. [...] There won't be anything else like that feeling.

The name for that feeling is Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

(note that happened around two decades before FB)

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

#56

Post by smcl »

eafkuor wrote: post #52

Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994? > Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.

The "without the user knowing the source" is an interesting part. Given some popular movements in North America right now you could have ended up with interesting answers for "Who won the 2024 election?", "Is JFK Jr alive?" or "Who is the Head of State in Canada", with a very authoritative-looking Google stamp of approval on it.

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

#57

Post by smcl »

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 :-)

I encountered this recently! I was looking at the source of a Maciej Cegłowski article on his idlewords.com site, and was perplexed at why

omitted. I had no idea it was valid HTML :)

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

#59

Post by neilv »

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…

I remember learning `

` this way in 1994. (And it was awhile before I saw `` end tags.)

Coincidentally, in April of this year, I got an urgent request from someone parsing 1994-era HTML, to change the ancient Racket permissive HTML parser, to support the even more ancient 1994 `p` elements better: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-parsing/#%28part._.H...

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

#60

Post by ClassyJacket »

fein wrote: post #3

> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas. Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.

And the human moderators.
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