4 ms·

The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation between popular and useful/valuable.

by _mdpn 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago
I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then. On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though? Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it is now. Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the internet much more interesting back then.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup. It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful. Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere. I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Yeah, I remember the times I didn't dare move because it might kill my download, back before resuming and download managers were a thing. Still, costly things feel more valuable, so I'd take a good hard look at what I really wanted before I committed to an 18 hour download for an installer ISO, and I'd certainly use it. Ubiquitous availability diminishes perceived value, for me at least. The large shift was from dialup/ISDN to DSL, I think, because it gave me more than ten times the speed (instead of the small increased with 9.6 => 14.4 => 28.8 => 56k => 64k). Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.

The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation between popular and useful/valuable.

by _mdpn 7y ago

The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation between popular and useful/valuable.

I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then. On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.

luckylion 7y ago
Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though? Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it is now. Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the internet much more interesting back then.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup. It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful. Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere. I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Yeah, I remember the times I didn't dare move because it might kill my download, back before resuming and download managers were a thing. Still, costly things feel more valuable, so I'd take a good hard look at what I really wanted before I committed to an 18 hour download for an installer ISO, and I'd certainly use it. Ubiquitous availability diminishes perceived value, for me at least. The large shift was from dialup/ISDN to DSL, I think, because it gave me more than ten times the speed (instead of the small increased with 9.6 => 14.4 => 28.8 => 56k => 64k). Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.