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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

#81

Post by saulpw »

senko wrote: post #55
echelon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

*one decade

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

#82

Post by anthk »

pelasaco wrote: post #75

The 90s in the internet were awesome. I loved to surf it with my Red Hat or Slackware using lynx and netscape and feel like a real hacker <3

I still use Lynx and Links for that, but with Puffy OS on a netbook :).

Luakit for JS masked crapwar... web sites.

Oh: https://wiby.me

Have fun :)

Addon Gopher site for Lynx, a good place to (re)start Gopher, kinda similar to the web portals from mid-late 90's:

gopher://magical.fish

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

#83

Post by anthk »

TrackerFF wrote: post #71
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…

I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete. We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel. 3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or…

It depends. 4 years later, you could get:

- A 64 MB Ram module, not bad for games and a boost for Win95.

AMD K6. Not as good as a late Pentium II/early Pentium III , but it would be much better than a Pentium 120.

https://www.forbes.com/1999/06/21/mu2.html?sh=4dc70c70494b

Then, the K7 was more expensive but damn cheap compared to a Pentium III.

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

#84

Post by andrepd »

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.)

Oh, I misread it, I thought GGP meant the other way around x)

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

#85

Post by philwelch »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #68
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.

That's because connecting to the internet was a rare, deliberate action for most people and not the default state of every electronic device.

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

#87

Post by anthk »

tpurves wrote: post #79

The best part? Nethack still is relevant and IMHO still one of the better video games you can play on the internet. Played it in the 90s, played it off and on again ever since, including this week!

And Slashem, because of new roles/races/tecniques/maps/objects.

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

#88

Post by anthk »

nemothekid wrote: post #35
bradford wrote: post #26

This 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 r…

I feel like the prediction came true but without any government intervention required.

That happened with Spain and Telefonica, the state phone/telco company.

Then they opened the teleco sector, prices went down, but then lots of small telecos and ISP's were eaten by the biggest fish, and the prices went a bit higher again (not as high, OFC, until we got a flat rate conn in Spain it was around ~1999).

We still don't have a free local call contract for example. SMS' are still paid, but everyone switched into Whatsapp around 10 years ago with smartphones and you get free calls to anywhere in Spain with an $20 internet connection, but not like the US where you have free local calls without doing anything.

Today there should be some connection for 10 EUR (~$10?) with a slower bandwidth, not everyone nets a fiber conn. And OFC I would declare 56K internet free, forever, with just a land line. Basic for IRC, Jabber, WA, small web pages, goverment pages such as the ones for applying for dates at the healthcare service, (hello Spanish ministries, you should copy the UK one, it runs on any browser) and so on.

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

#89

Post by bdw5204 »

pjc50 wrote: post #69
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…

I think most of today's problems are due to failures of the consensus in the 90s and 00s. The consensus interfered in Russia's 1996 presidential election (alienating Russia from the western world), allowed China to join the WTO on the assumption that capitalism would eventually lead to democracy in China and invaded Iraq in the name of spreading liberal democracy. The consensus also stood by and did nothing or even cheered as corporations shipped working class people's jobs to countries where they could pay next to nothing and decided that they were "multinational" with no loyalty whatsoever to their home country.

What I meant by "few real problems in the world" is that compared to global pandemics, terrorist attacks, the return of 70s style economic malaise, aging populations (in the 00s, this was a Japanese problem but it is now becoming a global problem) and the possibility of a nuclear WW3 if the tensions with Russia and/or China escalate, whatever problems people perceived in the 90s were trivial in comparison. Even the problems that remain unsolved from that time (like climate change) are generally much worse today because of decades of inaction. Its really hard to take seriously "problems" like the president having an affair with his intern or a famous football player getting acquitted of a murder that most people think he committed when you live in a time where the end of the world in the near future is a plausible outcome.

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

#90

Post by npteljes »

TrackerFF wrote: post #71
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…

I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete. We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel. 3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or…

I agree, the churn, as I experienced it, lasted until 2010 or so. My last CPU, an AMD FX-8350, is a 2012 model, and I still use it for gaming in my main PC. Before that, new tech was a must every 3-5 years or so.
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