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
#2“Best Usenet thread:
Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups”
Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#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.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#4There's so many good quotes in this but this might be my favorite:
> The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn't just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#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 world, how much of it is due to the internet becoming more popular and how much of it is due to certain platforms that are designed in a way that encourages their users to act badly. If we could take the internet back to 1990s levels of interactivity but with everybody still having a web browser in their pocket, would things be better or is today's internet worse because society as a whole is worse?
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#6Ah, #jeopardy brings back a lot of great memories. Met a lot of great people back in the day playing that on irc.
Canter and Siegel- two names that don’t mean much to people nowadays but that was a turning point in the “spam” industry.
I still have my copy of the Whole Internet Catalog on my bookshelf. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve come from. I’ll have to share it with my kids some day.
Thanks for the trip back memory lane.
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#7“Best Usenet thread: Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups” Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.
I believe a bunch of Usenet archives are available for download from archive.org. I remember when google gobbled up dejanews but I think that’s no longer online?
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#8> 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 1994 Wired article in which Godwin introduces the concept of Internet memes and recounts engineering the Nazi-comparison "counter-meme" is a short, intriguing read, with many quotes that are interesting and/or amusing to review in today's context: https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#9> This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world's leaders, politicians, and CEOs.
Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...
Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
#10> This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world's leaders, politicians, and CEOs. Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...
It appears to be the same newsletter, just renamed: https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/