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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

#61

Post by Sharlin »

andrepd wrote: post #54
icelancer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

Certainly "There were few real problems in the world" is such a naive and irrationally nostalgic take that it absolutely deserves criticism? (One datapoint: the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994.)

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

#62

Post by headsoup »

Sharlin wrote: post #61
andrepd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Certainly "There were few real problems in the world" is such a naive and irrationally nostalgic take that it absolutely deserves criticism? (One datapoint: the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994.)

Just as naive as 'the 90's was certainly worse.'

Were you in Rwanda in '94?

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

#63

Post by martyvis »

>Best public display/demo of the Internet: The Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter

We were just getting internet access going at my engineering office, and in a "stop press" submission to our weekly "desktop published" newsletter I submitted some photos of the comet hitting Jupiter I downloaded that day before it made the evening TV news.

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

#64

Post by pjc50 »

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

Microtransactions for content are never going to take off because of the friction and the potential for microfraud.

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

#65

Post by AdamH12113 »

watersb wrote: post #43
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.

CLIPPER was encryption. I don’t remember anything about remote kill switches for media (sounds too advanced for 1994), but there was also discussion in the 1990s about the V-chip, which was parental controls for broadcast TV. The technology was implemented but never amounted to much. Turns out parents weren’t any better at programming their TVs than they were their VCRs.

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

#66

Post by pjc50 »

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.

Much worse than that: cancels were unauthenticated. Anyone could cancel anything, and it was up to individual NNTP servers to decide whether to respect it or not. Usually they had some level of whitelisting to prevent total anarchy, but it was definitely a problem. NNTP was a true decentralized system, and people trying to build decentralized social media and discussion platforms really should learn from all the problems it never managed to solve.

https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_use...

See also the Russ Allbery spam rant https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

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

#67

Post by brabel »

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…

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-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/p).

HTML was designed to be written by hand as previous generations of typesetting languages. I think this is the main difference from XML, and this was the reason of a war in the 90's about making HTML a sub-set of XML: see XHTML (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/XHTM...)

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

#68

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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…

> Linux in every other pocket

Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.

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

#69

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world

They were definitely there, you just couldn't see them or they weren't happening in your country or to people you knew. But there was a period of relative peace from the end of the Cold War to 9/11, and a great deal more "consensus". This was achieved because there was nowhere for people outside the consensus to get heard.

> society as a whole is worse

To the extent that this is true - and I don't think it applies to all of today's society, many of whom are more tolerant and better informed - is it an effect of the internet on society?

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

#70

Post by brabel »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #29

Unbelievably 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

Very cool!

This is interesting as well:

"NOTE: The Telelabs System will be closed from late December till the end of February to conserve electrical energy and reduce associated greenhouse emissions."

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