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That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of tho

That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.
- dri_ft 8y ago
  It's heartbreaking.
  - Gravityloss 8y ago
    Shows we are not limited by technology but somehow get distracted by other things.
    - scroot 8y ago
      The "other things" are the short-termism and appealing to the lowest common denominator that go with the pursuit of profit before anything else.
- Joeri 8y ago
  I’m reading the book valley of genius where the xerox parc people basically make the same argument. The Xerox Alto’s smalltalk environment still isn’t matched today and the PC experience is much weaker for it. The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.
  - rickycook 8y ago
    kinda so did reasonably modern ideas. take active desktop for example! sure it’s more high level, but i believe the quote is that they wanted websites to do “cool things” with the desktop. cringeworthy by today’s standards... things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over
mr_toad 8y ago
In Usenet’s particular case it was its open, unmoderated nature that killed it - once it became 99% spam, warez and CP most ISPs dropped it.
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  There were moderated groups but IIRC they were updating more slowly because every message was reviewed. Anyway, there was a certain barrier for entry so there were less users and messages. But some really good experts posted there. And some really fun jokers.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.

dri_ft 8y ago
It's heartbreaking.
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  Shows we are not limited by technology but somehow get distracted by other things.
  - scroot 8y ago
    The "other things" are the short-termism and appealing to the lowest common denominator that go with the pursuit of profit before anything else.
Joeri 8y ago
I’m reading the book valley of genius where the xerox parc people basically make the same argument. The Xerox Alto’s smalltalk environment still isn’t matched today and the PC experience is much weaker for it. The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.
- rickycook 8y ago
  kinda so did reasonably modern ideas. take active desktop for example! sure it’s more high level, but i believe the quote is that they wanted websites to do “cool things” with the desktop. cringeworthy by today’s standards... things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over

mr_toad 8y ago

In Usenet’s particular case it was its open, unmoderated nature that killed it - once it became 99% spam, warez and CP most ISPs dropped it.

Gravityloss 8y ago
There were moderated groups but IIRC they were updating more slowly because every message was reviewed. Anyway, there was a certain barrier for entry so there were less users and messages. But some really good experts posted there. And some really fun jokers.