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ARPAnet, 1982: Late nights on a Heathkit H89 running CP/M, 24x80 green screen... dialing up at 300 baud to a terminal server, probably across the Potomac at the

ARPAnet, 1982: Late nights on a Heathkit H89 running CP/M, 24x80 green screen... dialing up at 300 baud to a terminal server, probably across the Potomac at the Pentagon, typing magic numbers (pre-TCP/IP) to connect over NCP to unseen computers at MIT. Stallman and others were happy to give out guest accounts to random teenagers like me, so I spent hours futzing around systems like the bizarre MIT-ITS (Incompatible Time-sharing System) or the only slightly less bizarre V6 Unix at mit-ccc. Discovered Usenet news and mailing lists and FTP archives and dove in headfirst. There was a feeling of rough travel then, with no paved roads, no centralized maps, few guidelines, but many kind strangers along the way. It wasn't all tech or sci-fi geekery -- I was parts of mailing lists as diverse as alternative music (Love-Hounds) and body piercing. Proto-WWW, 1993: Happened across O'Reilly & Associates at a network conference, and joined up with their Global Network Navigator project, the first commercial web publication (my first gig there was the first ad). Even so, every last one of us at GNN was passionate and excited about this medium exploding before our eyes. Everything was new, untried. There was no breaking things because so little was formed. There was a fluidity of expression (even within its constraints), a vast potential that was almost tangible, a sense that the web itself was a creative material to be molded. In this short time between the web's inception (~1993) and platforms like Geocities (~1995), we played in the raw muck of the primal web: HTTP + HTML + GIF + you.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
What do you think of how it has turned out so far?
- jslabovitz 8y ago
  Meh. Not great. (But thanks for asking.) Sure, there's definite improvements. More people have access, more of the time, and that's brought in interesting & creative people and projects. (As well as the obvious opposite.) It's easier to publish graphics, sound, video -- anything beyond text was difficult before. For a while, discovery was much improved, although I actually think that's gotten worse lately. What gets to me the most, though, are three things: 1. The loss of interoperability. When the internet started, there was a clear, strong value placed on interconnection. First it was through low-level protocols like NCP or TCP/IP, then through application protocols like FTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, Gopher, HTTP. This effort seemed to peak with network APIs (RESTful or not) and other standards like RSS/Atom. The protocols changed, but the idea remained: we, the users, should be able to build our own view of the internet, each according to our needs. This whole trajectory seems to have been greatly devalued in modern times. I understand that it's due to economics -- advertising wins over community -- but it's depressing as hell. 2. Centralization of services. We talk about this a lot on Hacker News; I don't need to elaborate. But take it from an old net.geezer that it feels extremely uncomfortable that most people only use a literal handful of sites -- and more and more people seem to question the idea of independent websites at all. 3. General complexity. I've retired from the tech world, in part, because of the overwhelming complexity of the technology. Maybe this is like the old days of science, where after a point, one person could not comprehend the field. But still, it saddens me that there seems less and less space for simplicity. I run all-static sites (with no Javascript and minimal CSS), not much different than I did in the mid-1990s -- and for that I'm a radical. I find that strange.
  - JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
    Thank you for your great answer. I read an HN poster the other day saying they ONLY use news aggregator sites because they are afraid of venturing on the web now. A little part of me died inside because the hidden corners of the web where you learn something new are the best virtue of the internet to me.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

What do you think of how it has turned out so far?

jslabovitz 8y ago
Meh. Not great. (But thanks for asking.) Sure, there's definite improvements. More people have access, more of the time, and that's brought in interesting & creative people and projects. (As well as the obvious opposite.) It's easier to publish graphics, sound, video -- anything beyond text was difficult before. For a while, discovery was much improved, although I actually think that's gotten worse lately. What gets to me the most, though, are three things: 1. The loss of interoperability. When the internet started, there was a clear, strong value placed on interconnection. First it was through low-level protocols like NCP or TCP/IP, then through application protocols like FTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, Gopher, HTTP. This effort seemed to peak with network APIs (RESTful or not) and other standards like RSS/Atom. The protocols changed, but the idea remained: we, the users, should be able to build our own view of the internet, each according to our needs. This whole trajectory seems to have been greatly devalued in modern times. I understand that it's due to economics -- advertising wins over community -- but it's depressing as hell. 2. Centralization of services. We talk about this a lot on Hacker News; I don't need to elaborate. But take it from an old net.geezer that it feels extremely uncomfortable that most people only use a literal handful of sites -- and more and more people seem to question the idea of independent websites at all. 3. General complexity. I've retired from the tech world, in part, because of the overwhelming complexity of the technology. Maybe this is like the old days of science, where after a point, one person could not comprehend the field. But still, it saddens me that there seems less and less space for simplicity. I run all-static sites (with no Javascript and minimal CSS), not much different than I did in the mid-1990s -- and for that I'm a radical. I find that strange.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  Thank you for your great answer. I read an HN poster the other day saying they ONLY use news aggregator sites because they are afraid of venturing on the web now. A little part of me died inside because the hidden corners of the web where you learn something new are the best virtue of the internet to me.