I remember, from the early 90s, reading all sorts of text files, from Phrack to Cult of the Dead Cow to Anarchists Cookbook to the Jargon File and Hacker Purity

I remember, from the early 90s, reading all sorts of text files, from Phrack to Cult of the Dead Cow to Anarchists Cookbook to the Jargon File and Hacker Purity Test type stuff. I remember one "phile" in particular about how to make a soda machine malfunction and dump its coins by pouring saltwater into the coin slot, to phreaking and "social engineering" tutorials in phrack, to drug use and hacking war stories from cDc. Many of these "philes" were indexed on FTP and Gopher servers, or available from BBS download areas. Early websites.. I remember reading Dr. Fun which was pretty similar to Far Side and all online. Church of the Subgenius had some really excellent subversive humor online, lots of fun as a young subversive teenager to read it and imagine what the authors were like. I think that just hearing about that kind of culture was a big escape for me as a teen in a rural area. Searching was terrible especially in the early days before the web. There was a tool called Archie to search for filenames on FTP servers, and it took hours to generate results. Yahoo made it easier to find good resources, Lycos, Hotbot, and eventually Altavista were rudimentary web search engines that were pretty low quality. Site admins linked their websites to other like-minded sites in "webrings" to help find similar content. I think that the lack of discoverability, fragmentation, and ephemerality (because hosting space WAS expensive so things DID get deleted) led to a greater sense of freedom of expression. I remember the old saying "on the internet nobody knows that you're a dog." (I just looked that up and it's a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 - very apropos for the time). I feel like that's the biggest change over the last ~30 years I have been online, the fact that most popular forums either use your real identity or are barely pseudononymous, and the understanding that today everything you do online is tracked, stored forever, and analyzed by multiple government and commercial entities. So yeah, it was pretty great when it was like the wild west, but it's a lot more "useful" today.