I was on IRC really early, 91, and it was great, there wasn't that many people on there and it felt way more international and you naturally ended up talking to people from all around the world (I'm from NZ). I even did two overseas trips to meet all kinds of people in real life and experiencing all kinds of slices of other peoples worlds. As more and more people got on the internet people ended up talking much more with locals (except for special interest groups). I'm still in contact with one of the very first friends I made on IRC (who is in the US) and have met them multiple times over the years
I didn't do IRC until early 2000s but I felt a lot of curiosity about being online with other people: were they from an opposite corner of the world? What was life like there? How interesting that we can talk to each other!
Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.
Same. I randomly had time off and someone in IRC noticed. I traveled from the US to Germany to hang out with them. Their brother was involved in BMW racing, and we hung out at Stuttgart for a few weekends in a trailer. Some of the best weeks of my life.
As the last generation that remembers what life was like before the internet, we need to ask ourselves - is the world we built better than the one we were born into? The older I get, the less convinced I am. It's not just nostalgia, as affirmed by Gen Zs rejection of the digital world.
I don't think this is a very difficult question to answer. The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place. The internet of the year 2025 makes the world a much, much worse place. We now live in an era where not only governments but every private business willing to pay a data broker has access to unlimited data for roughly every individual in a population, including their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, friends, political positions, sleep schedule, every phone call they've ever made, every website they've ever visited, every location they've ever taken their phone, every thing they've ever purchased. This information is currently used to shape the course of politics by manipulating what every individual sees, and will undoubtedly be used for unthinkable crimes against humanity in the coming years.
Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!"
Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
The internet of 2025 isn't the same thing at all. The early internet was a toy - a place for deviants and weirdos to do weird deviant things (and it was glorious). The rest of humanity found it and turned it into a mirror of the real world. That doesn't make it bad, in some ways it makes it better, in some ways worse, just definitely different.
I'm not sure that's the /internet/'s fault, but the humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology and our inability to regulate the technology to prevent harms.
There has been a lot of bad things about the technology of the past 30 years, but I refuse to say that things were fantastic pre-Internet. The fact that I can listen to any music I want for less than it cost me to buy a CD in 1995, not even adjusted for inflation, is amazing. The massive CD book I carried around is definitely nostalgia.
Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents.
Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.
> I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents
I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.
To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either.
But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.
I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.
I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
Really tricky. The big invisible (to many people) piece of progress is equalities; homophobia was much more overt back then. But I still think the best time for us in the UK was the 1997-2001 period. "Cool Brittania" to Iraq War.
1990 probably a bit too early. Right at the end of the Cold War. Deindustrialization still a big, ugly scar across many cities. The Troubles still ongoing; few residents of Northern Ireland would set the time machine back before 1998, I think.
By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
There is no "GenZ rejection of the digital world" thats a marketing narrative. Gen Z is overwhelmingly online and the handful that do reject it are no more than a rounding error.
Using it because you're practically forced to use it, is not the same as not rejecting it intellectually. While that's probably still a minority, it definitely seems larger than just a rounding error to me.
I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.
We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. But it doesn't matter as those who follow us don't know any better. It's like we are walking though a forest and you suddenly ask if this tree is better than the one 10 minutes ago.
We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either.
Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.
>
We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers.
Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
For me the late 80s - early 2000s was the peak. But I guess every generation has their own peak and I totally respect that.
That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.
I went online first time in 2010/2011 and I have to say, I wish I didn't. I remember the world before the internet and ever since it started, life became a massive blur...
You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence?
Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus.
Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago.
The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious.
They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have?
If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
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Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.
Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
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How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope?
Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?
Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?
Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents.
Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.
I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.
I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.
I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
1990 probably a bit too early. Right at the end of the Cold War. Deindustrialization still a big, ugly scar across many cities. The Troubles still ongoing; few residents of Northern Ireland would set the time machine back before 1998, I think.
By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.
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We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either.
Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.
Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.
You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence?
Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus.
They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago.
The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious.
They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have?
I am not owning this circus.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
I know I learned more from having ops in #unixhelp than stack overflow.
But the 90s were different, and it really depended on the channels.
I remember going into #nanog to finally get uunet to pull bgp routes once.
Sure there were bad parts, but at least you still had agency unlike with modern social media.
Why IRC is better than Real Life (2000)
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/Why%20IRC%20is%20better%...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611119)
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