9 ms·

Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier. The immense buzz when Mozilla open source

Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier. The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!) Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you'd just open a terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists) I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it. Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)

kalleboo 5y ago
I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for certain tasks...
bxjx 5y ago
Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm. You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so. I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!
- mark_undoio 5y ago
  Enlightenment was a particular favourite for me! But Rasterman is, as far as I know, still coding like crazy on new versions of Enlightenment: https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use. The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Tizen is practically dead.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    It's a hellscape of misery and suffering. https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
    - jancsika 5y ago
      You left out the best part-- the enlightenment developer starts replying in page five of the comments and gets caught up in a flame war! https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lang=en-US&page=5 https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan... It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      That article is wrong on several levels and the author just doesn't seem to understand what is going on. The whole part about how to set up windows is him not understanding that he's working with a retained mode scene graph - something the documentation[0] makes that clear. Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written. [0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/graphical-objects/ https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...
- jcims 5y ago
  Don’t forget the dark arts of configuring the Modeline in your X config to get that rock solid, flicker free screen of ridiculous resolution. And when you would push the limits and hear your crt scream in protest or start tumbling, tearing or just tapping out.
  - krylon 5y ago
    Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore. The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era. Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/
    - sobkas 5y ago
      > Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore. > The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era. > Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one). Now everything is so easy...
      - krylon 5y ago
        Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer, but I do remember having to download the driver for my sound card (Aureal Vortex<$something>) and compile an out-of-tree-module to get sound. For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details. And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs. In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.
- zelos 5y ago
  He worked on OpenMoko for a while when they chose enlightenment libs for the UI.
- josephd79 5y ago
  I still use last.fm lol
  - eliaspro 5y ago
    I started using it when it still was called AudioScrobbler... I miss "the old internet" so much!
  - wyclif 5y ago
    I do too, but I wish they'd do something with it instead of letting it languish. Scrobbling keeps breaking. How hard could it be to keep a scrobbling site up in 2022?
- johnisgood 5y ago
  The Enlightenment that has always been 17 and we were waiting for it to finally turn to 18? The one that had transparent windows through some plugins or whatever? Hell yeah! I installed it on Gentoo and when I made the windows transparent, I felt like I could do anything! I had Beryl, too, at some point.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I spent a few minutes a day over a couple of weeks tweaking my i3 desktop. It's still a thing :)
pjmlp 5y ago
Remember MKLinux as well?
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
I wasn't familiar with Freshmeat but you just unlocked a part of my memory mentioning everything2... I spent a lot of time of that site in 2001-2002 (probably earlier as well as a lurker, but that's the years when I wrote things), I really loved it and was also very useful for me to practice English writing at a time when my English skills were still rather limited (I remember writing my texts painfully slowly, and looking words up...). I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover). I might write again from time to time... Thanks for mentioning it! PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.
- gilleain 5y ago
  Indeed yes, E2 was so much better in many ways than things like Wikipedia (and worse in other ways, of course). The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing. Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    I loved e2. It was such a shame to see it fall in to disuse as everyone flocked to wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more nurturing of creativity.
- dmd 5y ago
  I (dmd) was in the top 5% of noders back then, went to a bunch of gatherings (like https://everything2.com/title/I%2527M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHDED%253A+Come+for+the+scenery%252C+stay+for+the+BAP+%2528another+E2+nodah+pahty%2529 https://everything2.com/title/I%2527M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHD... ). It was a wonderful time.
yankcrime 5y ago
Your comment was exactly what I had in mind when I posted this story - especially the bit about Enlightenment!
- Saint_Genet 5y ago
  I somehow feel tiling WMs occupy the same mindspace these days.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  old open source hippies unite! Thank you for posting this, you really made my day :D
fullstop 5y ago
I watched Freshmeat, religiously, for updates to GTK, WindowMaker, and WMPrefs. I don't even know why I built each release other than because I could and because I was learning so much. I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today. It was a neat time to live in, for sure.
ArtWomb 5y ago
Many of the people you meet in cloud services today at places like IBM, Dell, HP etc, are "old hippies" from that internet 1.0 era. Or even earlier from the Unix golden age of SG and Sun workstations. Mostly drifting into sales / pm roles. Although everyone remembers things differently. That institutional grounding of having to build internet services from fiber up really puts things in perspective for how easy it is to spin up a cluster ;)
em-bee 5y ago
i really like how the advogato site got preserved on archive.org through redirects from the original site. so that all urls pointing to it are still working.
mooreds 5y ago
I remember when I discovered Slashdot, using lynx as my browser. Felt like a whole wide world had opened up. Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.
cbm-vic-20 5y ago
I was watching Twitch developer stream where the young streamer was working with a new TUI library/service discussed earlier on HN[1]. I half jokingly asked a question if it worked with real hardware terminals, in particular a DEC VT420, and the developer didn't even know what that is. Feels old, man. Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420, but I understand why that's not exactly a priority. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332
- johnisgood 5y ago
  Feels... yeah... sorta saddening.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    Zoom out. Ignoring the fact everyone now has a supercomputer in their pocket, now you can literally outcompute that era of terminals for <$1. Huge flat screens hang in literally every room with resolutions dozens of times higher per axis than anything of that period. Voice input is finally here, and the very notion of a 'terminal' has become an anachronism. In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
> I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it. Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and realized you were already well into the eternal September by that stage! (I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see CPU and operating system and other software designers from different organizations debating everything from kernels to TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under their real names.)
- rasz 5y ago
  Yes, usenet, good old deeply technical discussions like "Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnzHjw/m/VlRbqq6HIyQJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz... by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    See, even the flamewars were more epic back then. And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart. Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.
randallsquared 5y ago
And kuro5hin, a sort of mix between Slashdot and Substack...
- iszomer 5y ago
  Yep, I remember spending far too much time reading kuro5hin.
  - nopzor 5y ago
    yes! the company i started after working for va linux ended up hosting kuro5hin for the longest time. it was a pretty tight community for a few years.
js2 5y ago
> The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!) VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient. I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset some LTGC. I purchased some wisdom with that experience. Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266 (I must be really boring at parties.)
- tempnow987 5y ago
  I was a broke student. I sold first day (luckily) just because I didn't have the money to hold onto them for any length of time. Worked out, but then my school took it back by reducing my financial aid award (OUCH).
- lenova 5y ago
  > I purchased some wisdom with that experience. That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)
wiz21c 5y ago
> Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !
samstave 5y ago
Sputnik, LinuxCare, GLP (fringe side), fark... Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast
haberman 5y ago
And SourceForge. It was the GitHub of its day, in terms of ubiquity and popularity. It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was available.
- zeruch 5y ago
  Once the old guard left or were jettisoned from VA, the fall was inevitable. The desperation crept in to survive and it rapidly became a race to the bottom. I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.
FireBeyond 5y ago
On more than one occasion I got called to a 'please explain' meeting to clarify that Freshmeat was not a "barely legal" porn site.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more." kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible archive of. That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was worth even a penny. I've since wondered who made that first article talking about bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I only have my own memories to go on.
glonq 5y ago
Don't forget Digg and Fark. I spent time on those post-slashdot / pre-reddit.
- AceyMan 5y ago
  ... and when you needed to bail out and rest your brain, instead of youtube or tiktok, we all surfed AdCritic.com Those Bubble 1.0 adverts were the best.
danudey 5y ago
> Slashdot No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
zeruch 5y ago
Same, fam. Same. I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.
nopzor 5y ago
total nostalgia bomb. i can’t tell you how much valinux changed my life. the excitement. the possibilities. the dotcom money. most of all the people - like rasterman, octobrx, rasmus of php fame. insane coalescence of talent. working there part time on linux.com was such a foundation experience for me as a freshman in college. i feel like an old hippie now too. but forever greatful to LNUX
jrnichols 5y ago
I have a lot of fond memories from around those times too. especially when linuxworld expo was in San Jose. you could drive by the VA Linux offices. Caldera OpenLinux was in a box at Fry's. thanks for the fun memories. :)

kalleboo 5y ago

I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for certain tasks...

bxjx 5y ago

Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm. You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.

bloopernova 5y ago
Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so. I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!
mark_undoio 5y ago
Enlightenment was a particular favourite for me! But Rasterman is, as far as I know, still coding like crazy on new versions of Enlightenment: https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use. The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Tizen is practically dead.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  It's a hellscape of misery and suffering. https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
  - jancsika 5y ago
    You left out the best part-- the enlightenment developer starts replying in page five of the comments and gets caught up in a flame war! https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lang=en-US&page=5 https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan... It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    That article is wrong on several levels and the author just doesn't seem to understand what is going on. The whole part about how to set up windows is him not understanding that he's working with a retained mode scene graph - something the documentation[0] makes that clear. Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written. [0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/graphical-objects/ https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...
jcims 5y ago
Don’t forget the dark arts of configuring the Modeline in your X config to get that rock solid, flicker free screen of ridiculous resolution. And when you would push the limits and hear your crt scream in protest or start tumbling, tearing or just tapping out.
- krylon 5y ago
  Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore. The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era. Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore. > The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era. > Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one). Now everything is so easy...
    - krylon 5y ago
      Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer, but I do remember having to download the driver for my sound card (Aureal Vortex<$something>) and compile an out-of-tree-module to get sound. For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details. And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs. In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.
zelos 5y ago
He worked on OpenMoko for a while when they chose enlightenment libs for the UI.
josephd79 5y ago
I still use last.fm lol
- eliaspro 5y ago
  I started using it when it still was called AudioScrobbler... I miss "the old internet" so much!
- wyclif 5y ago
  I do too, but I wish they'd do something with it instead of letting it languish. Scrobbling keeps breaking. How hard could it be to keep a scrobbling site up in 2022?
johnisgood 5y ago
The Enlightenment that has always been 17 and we were waiting for it to finally turn to 18? The one that had transparent windows through some plugins or whatever? Hell yeah! I installed it on Gentoo and when I made the windows transparent, I felt like I could do anything! I had Beryl, too, at some point.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I spent a few minutes a day over a couple of weeks tweaking my i3 desktop. It's still a thing :)

pjmlp 5y ago

Remember MKLinux as well?

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

I wasn't familiar with Freshmeat but you just unlocked a part of my memory mentioning everything2... I spent a lot of time of that site in 2001-2002 (probably earlier as well as a lurker, but that's the years when I wrote things), I really loved it and was also very useful for me to practice English writing at a time when my English skills were still rather limited (I remember writing my texts painfully slowly, and looking words up...). I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover). I might write again from time to time... Thanks for mentioning it! PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.

gilleain 5y ago
Indeed yes, E2 was so much better in many ways than things like Wikipedia (and worse in other ways, of course). The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing. Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I loved e2. It was such a shame to see it fall in to disuse as everyone flocked to wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more nurturing of creativity.
dmd 5y ago
I (dmd) was in the top 5% of noders back then, went to a bunch of gatherings (like https://everything2.com/title/I%2527M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHDED%253A+Come+for+the+scenery%252C+stay+for+the+BAP+%2528another+E2+nodah+pahty%2529 https://everything2.com/title/I%2527M+GUNNA+BE+WICKED+RETAHD... ). It was a wonderful time.

yankcrime 5y ago

Your comment was exactly what I had in mind when I posted this story - especially the bit about Enlightenment!

Saint_Genet 5y ago
I somehow feel tiling WMs occupy the same mindspace these days.
bloopernova 5y ago
old open source hippies unite! Thank you for posting this, you really made my day :D

fullstop 5y ago

I watched Freshmeat, religiously, for updates to GTK, WindowMaker, and WMPrefs. I don't even know why I built each release other than because I could and because I was learning so much. I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today. It was a neat time to live in, for sure.

ArtWomb 5y ago

Many of the people you meet in cloud services today at places like IBM, Dell, HP etc, are "old hippies" from that internet 1.0 era. Or even earlier from the Unix golden age of SG and Sun workstations. Mostly drifting into sales / pm roles. Although everyone remembers things differently. That institutional grounding of having to build internet services from fiber up really puts things in perspective for how easy it is to spin up a cluster ;)

em-bee 5y ago

i really like how the advogato site got preserved on archive.org through redirects from the original site. so that all urls pointing to it are still working.

mooreds 5y ago

I remember when I discovered Slashdot, using lynx as my browser. Felt like a whole wide world had opened up. Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.

cbm-vic-20 5y ago

I was watching Twitch developer stream where the young streamer was working with a new TUI library/service discussed earlier on HN[1]. I half jokingly asked a question if it worked with real hardware terminals, in particular a DEC VT420, and the developer didn't even know what that is. Feels old, man. Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420, but I understand why that's not exactly a priority. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332

johnisgood 5y ago
Feels... yeah... sorta saddening.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Zoom out. Ignoring the fact everyone now has a supercomputer in their pocket, now you can literally outcompute that era of terminals for <$1. Huge flat screens hang in literally every room with resolutions dozens of times higher per axis than anything of that period. Voice input is finally here, and the very notion of a 'terminal' has become an anachronism. In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

> I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it. Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and realized you were already well into the eternal September by that stage! (I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see CPU and operating system and other software designers from different organizations debating everything from kernels to TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under their real names.)

rasz 5y ago
Yes, usenet, good old deeply technical discussions like "Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnzHjw/m/VlRbqq6HIyQJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz... by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  See, even the flamewars were more epic back then. And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart. Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.

randallsquared 5y ago

And kuro5hin, a sort of mix between Slashdot and Substack...

iszomer 5y ago
Yep, I remember spending far too much time reading kuro5hin.
- nopzor 5y ago
  yes! the company i started after working for va linux ended up hosting kuro5hin for the longest time. it was a pretty tight community for a few years.

js2 5y ago

> The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!) VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient. I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset some LTGC. I purchased some wisdom with that experience. Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266 (I must be really boring at parties.)

tempnow987 5y ago
I was a broke student. I sold first day (luckily) just because I didn't have the money to hold onto them for any length of time. Worked out, but then my school took it back by reducing my financial aid award (OUCH).
lenova 5y ago
> I purchased some wisdom with that experience. That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)

wiz21c 5y ago

> Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !

samstave 5y ago

Sputnik, LinuxCare, GLP (fringe side), fark... Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast

haberman 5y ago

And SourceForge. It was the GitHub of its day, in terms of ubiquity and popularity. It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was available.

zeruch 5y ago
Once the old guard left or were jettisoned from VA, the fall was inevitable. The desperation crept in to survive and it rapidly became a race to the bottom. I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.

FireBeyond 5y ago

On more than one occasion I got called to a 'please explain' meeting to clarify that Freshmeat was not a "barely legal" porn site.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more." kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible archive of. That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was worth even a penny. I've since wondered who made that first article talking about bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I only have my own memories to go on.

glonq 5y ago

Don't forget Digg and Fark. I spent time on those post-slashdot / pre-reddit.

AceyMan 5y ago
... and when you needed to bail out and rest your brain, instead of youtube or tiktok, we all surfed AdCritic.com Those Bubble 1.0 adverts were the best.

danudey 5y ago

> Slashdot No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

zeruch 5y ago

Same, fam. Same. I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.

nopzor 5y ago

total nostalgia bomb. i can’t tell you how much valinux changed my life. the excitement. the possibilities. the dotcom money. most of all the people - like rasterman, octobrx, rasmus of php fame. insane coalescence of talent. working there part time on linux.com was such a foundation experience for me as a freshman in college. i feel like an old hippie now too. but forever greatful to LNUX

jrnichols 5y ago

I have a lot of fond memories from around those times too. especially when linuxworld expo was in San Jose. you could drive by the VA Linux offices. Caldera OpenLinux was in a box at Fry's. thanks for the fun memories. :)