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I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for "everything/

by frikk 10y ago

I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for "everything/nothing". In my case, this was exactly correct. It was a place for my friends to post stupid stuff, a place for me to experiment with css and php, build new "features" just for fun. It was an open playground in a new world. It was a lot of fun. I also just remembered how it was hosted. I became known as the neighborhood kid who collected old computers, so I ended up with a bunch of weird hardware. The site was originally hosted on a 75mhz intel something or another sitting behind a 133mhz linux frankenstein gateway in my bedroom. I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! The other cool thing was connecting with other e/n site owners who were also doing their thing. Sometimes you'd collaborate or ping each other's APIs, other times participate in their own experiments. Thousands of little web sites with micro communities built on spaghetti code, almost all have certainly faded away through the various ways that tiny sites die: a web host gets sold, an upstream system upgrade botched but not addressed, a missed payment, an unpatched vulnerability. Maybe today the owner still maintains the domain name out of nostalgia. Shoutout to gyrate.org and sejje.net; Rest in peace, frikk.tk

lucb1e 10y ago
> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! Same here, though probably about a decade later on early versions of mobile data. They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.
- vocatus_gate 10y ago
  > They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now. Never lose hope.
sejje 10y ago
Hey, frikk. What did you call that little chat box? Shoutbox? You invented twitter, pretty sure.
- frikk 10y ago
  Haha. Hey dude. I figured you'd find your way over here. :P Forgot all about that little shoutbox.
pixl97 10y ago
> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data Lots of data accounting systems 'back in the day' counted every packet as 1500 bytes. So if you send 1 million packets it was 1,500 * 1,000,000 = 1.5GB In reality the average packet size in 98 or so was much smaller 600 * 350,000 = 210 MB 1,500 * 650,000 = 975 MB Total = 1.185GB (a difference of 315MB) https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-analysis/pkt_size_distribution/graphs.xml https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-analysis/pkt_size_dis... Depending on your packet profile you may have seen anywhere from a 20 to 50% overhead.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Which is ridiculous. I worked at an ISP in '99, and even back then it was just Apache log parsing with Perl (whether that be a custom script or some open source project written in Perl). Colocation usage was done by logging byte counters on switch ports. This was a small independent ISP with maybe 3-4 sysadmins/network operations people. Not doing at least that much seems pretty rinky-dink to me. It was trivial to do that much.
m0rdecai 10y ago
I enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame via e/n, though the attention ultimately resulted in the demise of my site. It was all fun and games until the lines between the internet "playground" and real life were blurred, and my school/parents started getting phone calls. Social media also deteriorated the separation between "online" and "IRL". I retired my site in favor of a career :)

by frikk 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago

> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! Same here, though probably about a decade later on early versions of mobile data. They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.

vocatus_gate 10y ago
> They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now. Never lose hope.

sejje 10y ago

Hey, frikk. What did you call that little chat box? Shoutbox? You invented twitter, pretty sure.

frikk 10y ago
Haha. Hey dude. I figured you'd find your way over here. :P Forgot all about that little shoutbox.

pixl97 10y ago

> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data Lots of data accounting systems 'back in the day' counted every packet as 1500 bytes. So if you send 1 million packets it was 1,500 * 1,000,000 = 1.5GB In reality the average packet size in 98 or so was much smaller 600 * 350,000 = 210 MB 1,500 * 650,000 = 975 MB Total = 1.185GB (a difference of 315MB) https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-analysis/pkt_size_distribution/graphs.xml https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-analysis/pkt_size_dis... Depending on your packet profile you may have seen anywhere from a 20 to 50% overhead.

kbenson 10y ago
Which is ridiculous. I worked at an ISP in '99, and even back then it was just Apache log parsing with Perl (whether that be a custom script or some open source project written in Perl). Colocation usage was done by logging byte counters on switch ports. This was a small independent ISP with maybe 3-4 sysadmins/network operations people. Not doing at least that much seems pretty rinky-dink to me. It was trivial to do that much.

m0rdecai 10y ago

I enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame via e/n, though the attention ultimately resulted in the demise of my site. It was all fun and games until the lines between the internet "playground" and real life were blurred, and my school/parents started getting phone calls. Social media also deteriorated the separation between "online" and "IRL". I retired my site in favor of a career :)