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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

162 points by miniatureape 4y ago

melling 4y ago
“Best Usenet thread: Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups” Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.
- ipython 4y ago
  I believe a bunch of Usenet archives are available for download from archive.org. I remember when google gobbled up dejanews but I think that’s no longer online?
- klik99 4y ago
  I had a moment like that seeing this very real newspaper snippet from 1912: https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/photos/a.220359594804465/1888965524610522/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/photos/a.220359... "This effect may be considerable in a few centuries", indeed
fein 4y ago
> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas. Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  It was also the alt.scientology war.
  - warning26 4y ago
    Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Scientology holds their non-newbie teachings as, essentially, trade secrets. You only get to see them after you pay a lot of money to "advance" in their ranks. Somebody - presumably a disgruntled insider - started publishing some of their texts on alt.scientology. Scientology tried to stop them by automated (or very rapid human) cancels, with forged "from" fields. Posts on the board got "visited by the cancel bunny". Then people calling themselves "rabbit hunters" tried to figure out who was the source(s) of the cancel messages. But it got knarlier than that. Scientology's texts were copyrighted; they had police seize the servers of people who put copies of the texts online. Wired had a good write-up: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/ https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/
      - andai 4y ago
        If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
        fritztastic 4y ago
        Great info. That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".
        clsec 4y ago
        Yep, a real photo. Unfortunately, I participated in the making of that sign. It was made at a sign company in Oakland, CA that is owned and operated by Scientologists. As a matter of fact, it was this sign that started my investigation into the goings on at said company and my discovery that the owner, sales manager, production manager and H.R. person were all full fledged Scientologists. Needless to say, I quit that job. But it wasn't over.. on my exit interview they grilled me on why I was quitting/what I thought of the company. Then they spent the next 2 years trying to serve me for stealing documents that I didn't steal.
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  And the human moderators.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Much worse than that: cancels were unauthenticated. Anyone could cancel anything, and it was up to individual NNTP servers to decide whether to respect it or not. Usually they had some level of whitelisting to prevent total anarchy, but it was definitely a problem. NNTP was a true decentralized system, and people trying to build decentralized social media and discussion platforms really should learn from all the problems it never managed to solve. https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_usenet_part_v_authentication_and_norms https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_use... See also the Russ Allbery spam rant https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
- ok123456 4y ago
  When I was about 11, I remember I asked for disk images of Logo for Apple ][ or something along those lines on Usenet. Someone at a university cancelled the message, but then felt pangs of guilt. He emailed me an apology and then offered to send me the disks through the mail. I emailed him back my address, and he sent the disks to me through the "snail mail" as they called it back then.
boredtofears 4y ago
There's so many good quotes in this but this might be my favorite: > The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn't just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity.
bdw5204 4y ago
> There's not much that's bad on the Net Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet. I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world, how much of it is due to the internet becoming more popular and how much of it is due to certain platforms that are designed in a way that encourages their users to act badly. If we could take the internet back to 1990s levels of interactivity but with everybody still having a web browser in their pocket, would things be better or is today's internet worse because society as a whole is worse?
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  The 1994 Wired article in which Godwin introduces the concept of Internet memes and recounts engineering the Nazi-comparison "counter-meme" is a short, intriguing read, with many quotes that are interesting and/or amusing to review in today's context: https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...
- swatcoder 4y ago
  The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world. Just not as much for the nerds and curious professionals from “the West” that were playfully developing the internet like a quirky little collaborative art gallery. The demographics of the internet were just very different then. I don’t think it’s so much a change in the character of the world that makes it different now, so much as that nearly the whole breadth of the world are staking claims in it, and thus a lot of the contention and animosity that has always existed in the real world now finally shows up here too.
  - antod 4y ago
    > The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world. Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms. Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on each other they mostly overlap - and both seem hell bent on ruining the other.
ipython 4y ago
Ah, #jeopardy brings back a lot of great memories. Met a lot of great people back in the day playing that on irc. Canter and Siegel- two names that don’t mean much to people nowadays but that was a turning point in the “spam” industry. I still have my copy of the Whole Internet Catalog on my bookshelf. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve come from. I’ll have to share it with my kids some day. Thanks for the trip back memory lane.
mattl 4y ago
> This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world's leaders, politicians, and CEOs. Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-interview/ https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...
- abbeyj 4y ago
  It appears to be the same newsletter, just renamed: https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/ https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/
anthk 4y ago
>Nethack. A dungeon-exploration game to which even non-Dungeons and Dragons fanatics can become addicted. Every adventure game has monsters and magic items, but Nethack has so many monsters, magic items, puzzling situations, and amazing secrets that you'll completely forget about the ASCII graphics. It's the most complex and thought-intensive adventure you'll experience on the Net (to access Nethack, FTP to linc.cis.upenn.edu /pub/NH3.1/binaries; also read rec.games.roguelike.nethack). I still play it today, but under Slashem. A crazy thing: Nethack 3.4.3 was released in 2003 and it was for long THE latest release of Nethack until the 3.6.x banch. Thus, that release was ported to anything capable, from Amigas to Ataris, Windows, DOS, PowerPC Macs, M68k Macs, Solaris boxes, the PSP, Android, iOS... everything. Oh, and the lack of releases until Nethack 3.6.x helped Slashem to develop a lot. >The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000). telnet freechess.org 5000. Same spirit. Use XBoard if you want some GUI. >Software that handles virtually all network functions via one seamless interface will emerge and begin to dominate the commercial Internet marketplace. Netscape and Mozilla Suite. Now Chrome it's almost an OS. For the rest: http://theoldnet.com http://theoldnet.com
quickthrower2 4y ago
I miss /~username/ urls. Also that HTML! <html> <BASE HREF=http://www.mecklerweb.com/mags/iw/v6n1/feat26.htm> <TITLE>v6n1 January 1995 Best and Worst</TITLE> <H1>The Best and Worst of 1994 and Predictions for '95</H1> <I>by Eric Berlin</I><P><I> </I><HR> ... No </P>'s to be found :-)
- deleted 4y ago
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- gmmeyer 4y ago
  it's funny that web browsers parse Ps in there
- kristopolous 4y ago
  That's in spec for the time. HTML 2.0 draft 00, November 1994: "2.14.1 Paragraph <P> Level 0 The Paragraph element indicates a paragraph. The exact indentation, leading, etc. of a paragraph is not defined and may be a function of other tags, style sheets, etc. Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space of one line or half a line. This is typically not the case within the Address element and or is never the case within the Preformatted Text element. With some HTML user agents, the first line in a paragraph is indented. Example of use: <H1>This Heading Precedes the Paragraph</H1> <P>This is the text of the first paragraph. <P>This is the text of the second paragraph. Although you do not need to start paragraphs on new lines, maintaining this convention facilitates document maintenance. <P>This is the text of a third paragraph. " https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-00 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-0... This is still "true". You can't embed a <P> in another <P>. It's special that way. I've never tried it using JS with just an addChild though, I wonder what would happen...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Like the optional semicolon in JS. I am a semicolon guy (and general unfan of JS tricks and shortcuts) but plenty of people prefer not to have them!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 4y ago
Many people miss the early internet and say the magic has been lost. I get that feeling about bbs(es). When they started shutting down because of the internet magic was lost. The early internet was great but already too big.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
My first internet memory is around this time (1994/1995). I was a little kid and I thought I'd check out nasa's website at nasa.com to see some cool space photos - whoops! Someone had camped that domain (The actual one being nasa.gov) for porn.
pcblues 4y ago
They failed to mention (in either the best or worst column, YMMV) alt.binaries.tasteless and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork Well, I could have finished uni a lot quicker without knowing about them.
bradford 4y ago
This excerpt is sure to provoke some opinions: > Worst: Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  I feel like the prediction came true but without any government intervention required.
  - anthk 4y ago
    That happened with Spain and Telefonica, the state phone/telco company. Then they opened the teleco sector, prices went down, but then lots of small telecos and ISP's were eaten by the biggest fish, and the prices went a bit higher again (not as high, OFC, until we got a flat rate conn in Spain it was around ~1999). We still don't have a free local call contract for example. SMS' are still paid, but everyone switched into Whatsapp around 10 years ago with smartphones and you get free calls to anywhere in Spain with an $20 internet connection, but not like the US where you have free local calls without doing anything. Today there should be some connection for 10 EUR (~$10?) with a slower bandwidth, not everyone nets a fiber conn. And OFC I would declare 56K internet free, forever, with just a land line. Basic for IRC, Jabber, WA, small web pages, goverment pages such as the ones for applying for dates at the healthcare service, (hello Spanish ministries, you should copy the UK one, it runs on any browser) and so on.
porcoda 4y ago
I remember watching the Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter : that was one of the earliest interesting “live” things I remember seeing on the internet, via Mosaic on my little Slackware Linux workstation at the local university. That was pretty cool. I often remember it when I’m watching current astronomy events unfold live: probes launch or land on mars, or data releases from telescopes.
sbf501 4y ago
I'm amazed how close we came to the CLIPPER chip. That would have undermined literally everything digital. Thanks to everyone who helped kill that.
- skywal_l 4y ago
- watersb 4y ago
  Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"? I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.
  - AdamH12113 4y ago
    CLIPPER was encryption. I don’t remember anything about remote kill switches for media (sounds too advanced for 1994), but there was also discussion in the 1990s about the V-chip, which was parental controls for broadcast TV. The technology was implemented but never amounted to much. Turns out parents weren’t any better at programming their TVs than they were their VCRs.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      Things were symmetrically encrypted, but the government had an additional decrypt key for EVERY chip made.
Rodeoclash 4y ago
Unbelievably the link for the remote robot arm: Remote Robot Arm (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au) Still resolves to a website related to the project
- brabel 4y ago
  Very cool! This is interesting as well: "NOTE: The Telelabs System will be closed from late December till the end of February to conserve electrical energy and reduce associated greenhouse emissions."
cnfernandes 4y ago
Apparently “worst of internet” was… “The organization of the World-Wide Web. I love the Web, but finding something specific on it is a nightmare. And because the Web is growing by leaps and bounds, I just don't see things getting easier anytime soon.” Made me smile... especially the last line. :)
rconti 4y ago
> I remember the first time I saw a URL address: http://www.something.something.something http://www.something.something.something. "Ugh," I moaned. "A whole new language I have to learn? I was just getting the hang of Unix!" I immediately resigned myself to the fact that this might be the end of my days in cyberspace. The Net had become somewhat of a runaway locomotive and I was the woman running behind it, screaming for the conductor to please wait! Then suddenly it all came together. A Net guru friend told me about Lynx. "All you have to do," he said, "is type the word 'lynx' at your Unix prompt, and presto! You're into the Web." That weekend I spent about eight hours a day exploring. I quickly found out that you could access all your favorite telnet, FTP, and Gopher sites from the Web, as well as tons of resources you would never find anywhere else on the Net. My cyberlife had changed forever. Fantastic.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Ha, my experience was quite similar. I was a Unix nerd and a big fan of Gopher, and when the WWW came along I had much the same reaction as TFA. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment with my laptop - I think - and scrolling through lynx while I endured a bout of chickenpox, many years ago. We eventually downloaded and built Mosaic for X-windows, and I still remember the look on my boss' face when we scrolled down in an article about Shoemaker–Levy and there was a photo of it hitting Jupiter. He nearly fell off his chair. So, I suppose that means I've been on the Internet for at least 28 years... ugh.
  - rconti 4y ago
    I'm probably only a couple years behind you, as my first shell access was '94 but I had no way to do graphical stuff. Eventually I installed Slackware disksets in '95 and could run Mosaic under X, but needless to say, 4MB of RAM was not really sufficient to do anything. Funny, on that page there's also a quip about "why does everybody feel like their homepage need to have a 100kb image to slow down page loads to a crawl?"
klik99 4y ago
So little has changed. People were predicting that sometime very soon(TM) everyone will be cancelled "just because someone doesn't like their ideas", people still having huge arguments on global warming, "any tragic event" has people who "taunted its seriousness", and Nethack is still awesome.
Shorel 4y ago
> Two new standards; the first for dial-in users, the second for commerce. The two standards are more and more different each year XD Public IP addresses, for example. Big sites have public routeable IPs, end users are behind one or more levels of NAT. You have to pay extra money to be able to be able to open ports 80/443. > All data are Mosaic. What is it about the World-Wide Web that makes everyone want to stick 100-K pictures on their home pages? Add that to the incredible inefficiencies and poor designs of the Gopher and HTTP (WWW) protocols and we see another generation of computing resources torpedoed by the enthusiasm and poor programming of graduate students. Now even the programming languages and runtimes are Web-based! Inefficiencies are compound.
yread 4y ago
> Digital cash will bring home shopping and pay-per-view to the Internet, as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions
- Anunayj 4y ago
  > as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Well atleast cryptocurrencies solved that.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Microtransactions for content are never going to take off because of the friction and the potential for microfraud.
  - prionassembly 4y ago
    openseas.com
watersb 4y ago
I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another 30 pounds and another $1000 for the docking stations and mice and ergonomic plastic monitor stands and Ethernet AUI for your 10BASE-5 Local Area Network. JPEG was not yet a thing. [edit: yes, it was; Netscape Navigator shipped with JPEG support in December 1994. But that's before this original article was released.] Shareware. I actually paid for a license for PKZip! And I bought a Netscape license too -- I think it was 2.0, it was $40. That was their business model: sell browser software. The server happened the following year. NeXTStep Developer License was $3000 per year. Windows MSDN was not free, either. I paid for a $2000 annual subscription at least once. Linux was shaping up remarkably quickly, a rallying point for open source userland tools... but BSDi wasn't free. Any other UNIX was thousands of dollars -- that Open Group industry model. The 1990s were expensive and awkward. I am utterly stunned that it all turned out as well as it has: NeXTStep in every pocket, and Linux in every other pocket, and most tools are free, the Internet everywhere, and strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal. It's not perfect but it was going to be so much worse.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  > Linux in every other pocket Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    That's because connecting to the internet was a rare, deliberate action for most people and not the default state of every electronic device.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000). ICS was fantastic back in the day (shout out to FICS that has been great since 1998 and still going). I'll never forget being logged into ICS on 9/11 while watching the towers get hit and chatting on there with different people around the country and the world stunned at what was going on.
eafkuor 4y ago
Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994? > Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.
- senko 4y ago
  "Smart Agents" that will do their owners' bidding where all the rage then. The idea was you'd have this autonomous software robots that would go around searching for information (or do whatever else) you needed on the internet. In terms of technical description, they were closer to today's web3 smart contracts than how Google works. In the end, nothing came of all that hype tho. Turns out it was easier to build Google :-)
- smcl 4y ago
  The "without the user knowing the source" is an interesting part. Given some popular movements in North America right now you could have ended up with interesting answers for "Who won the 2024 election?", "Is JFK Jr alive?" or "Who is the Head of State in Canada", with a very authoritative-looking Google stamp of approval on it.
OJFord 4y ago
Books about the internet, for sale (only) by email/phone/mail order, brilliant.
martyvis 4y ago
>Best public display/demo of the Internet: The Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter We were just getting internet access going at my engineering office, and in a "stop press" submission to our weekly "desktop published" newsletter I submitted some photos of the comet hitting Jupiter I downloaded that day before it made the evening TV news.
dasil003 4y ago
The calm before the storm of the web taking over everything. Interesting to remember how big MUDs were, or gopher, usenet, FTP, etc.
pelasaco 4y ago
The 90s in the internet were awesome. I loved to surf it with my Red Hat or Slackware using lynx and netscape and feel like a real hacker <3
- anthk 4y ago
  I still use Lynx and Links for that, but with Puffy OS on a netbook :). Luakit for JS masked crapwar... web sites. Oh: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me Have fun :) Addon Gopher site for Lynx, a good place to (re)start Gopher, kinda similar to the web portals from mid-late 90's: gopher://magical.fish
jliptzin 4y ago
But the worst offense is that AOL, like other major on-line services, is taking from the Internet without giving back. Replace AOL here with some other big internet companies I don’t have to name and it’s the same story
tpurves 4y ago
The best part? Nethack still is relevant and IMHO still one of the better video games you can play on the internet. Played it in the 90s, played it off and on again ever since, including this week!
- anthk 4y ago
  And Slashem, because of new roles/races/tecniques/maps/objects.
lakomen 4y ago
1994 was one of the best years in my life. Sex drugs and Techno. Love Parade, clubbing, being young. If I could turn back time.. If I could find a way.
jedberg 4y ago
> Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game. Oh man, I remember that! I was always pissed that the IRC server I had access to had bad connectivity, and I had bad connectivity to it. Even if I knew the answer right away it was impossible to be first.
jonhohle 4y ago
> A protocol will be developed for smaller interest groups to form larger common-interest federations. How I wish this existed. Something like BBS and online forums, with the ability to create private channels with E2E encryption. There’s probably no commercial viability, but the idea of a common interface for communities sounds awesome.
- anthk 4y ago
  Private tildes (public Unix machines) with a federated Usenet service do exist. For private "channels", inner mail list with GPG integrated into Mutt. Solved. https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/ They have Usenet, mail, IRC and some sort of local (for use inside a single a server) and federated (the message from a user it's spread across all the federation) BBS'.

162 points by miniatureape 4y ago

“Best Usenet thread: Follow-ups to "Global Warning" in dozens of Usenet groups” Would be interesting to see the discussions from 30 years ago.

ipython 4y ago
I believe a bunch of Usenet archives are available for download from archive.org. I remember when google gobbled up dejanews but I think that’s no longer online?
klik99 4y ago
I had a moment like that seeing this very real newspaper snippet from 1912: https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/photos/a.220359594804465/1888965524610522/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/photos/a.220359... "This effect may be considerable in a few centuries", indeed

fein 4y ago

> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas. Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
It was also the alt.scientology war.
- warning26 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Scientology holds their non-newbie teachings as, essentially, trade secrets. You only get to see them after you pay a lot of money to "advance" in their ranks. Somebody - presumably a disgruntled insider - started publishing some of their texts on alt.scientology. Scientology tried to stop them by automated (or very rapid human) cancels, with forged "from" fields. Posts on the board got "visited by the cancel bunny". Then people calling themselves "rabbit hunters" tried to figure out who was the source(s) of the cancel messages. But it got knarlier than that. Scientology's texts were copyrighted; they had police seize the servers of people who put copies of the texts online. Wired had a good write-up: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/ https://www.wired.com/1995/12/alt-scientology-war/
    - andai 4y ago
      If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
      - fritztastic 4y ago
        Great info. That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".
        clsec 4y ago
        Yep, a real photo. Unfortunately, I participated in the making of that sign. It was made at a sign company in Oakland, CA that is owned and operated by Scientologists. As a matter of fact, it was this sign that started my investigation into the goings on at said company and my discovery that the owner, sales manager, production manager and H.R. person were all full fledged Scientologists. Needless to say, I quit that job. But it wasn't over.. on my exit interview they grilled me on why I was quitting/what I thought of the company. Then they spent the next 2 years trying to serve me for stealing documents that I didn't steal.
ClassyJacket 4y ago
And the human moderators.
pjc50 4y ago
Much worse than that: cancels were unauthenticated. Anyone could cancel anything, and it was up to individual NNTP servers to decide whether to respect it or not. Usually they had some level of whitelisting to prevent total anarchy, but it was definitely a problem. NNTP was a true decentralized system, and people trying to build decentralized social media and discussion platforms really should learn from all the problems it never managed to solve. https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_usenet_part_v_authentication_and_norms https://circleid.com/posts/20191125_the_early_history_of_use... See also the Russ Allbery spam rant https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
ok123456 4y ago
When I was about 11, I remember I asked for disk images of Logo for Apple ][ or something along those lines on Usenet. Someone at a university cancelled the message, but then felt pangs of guilt. He emailed me an apology and then offered to send me the disks through the mail. I emailed him back my address, and he sent the disks to me through the "snail mail" as they called it back then.

boredtofears 4y ago

There's so many good quotes in this but this might be my favorite: > The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn't just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity.

bdw5204 4y ago

> There's not much that's bad on the Net Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet. I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world, how much of it is due to the internet becoming more popular and how much of it is due to certain platforms that are designed in a way that encourages their users to act badly. If we could take the internet back to 1990s levels of interactivity but with everybody still having a web browser in their pocket, would things be better or is today's internet worse because society as a whole is worse?

mgdlbp 4y ago
The 1994 Wired article in which Godwin introduces the concept of Internet memes and recounts engineering the Nazi-comparison "counter-meme" is a short, intriguing read, with many quotes that are interesting and/or amusing to review in today's context: https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...
swatcoder 4y ago
The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world. Just not as much for the nerds and curious professionals from “the West” that were playfully developing the internet like a quirky little collaborative art gallery. The demographics of the internet were just very different then. I don’t think it’s so much a change in the character of the world that makes it different now, so much as that nearly the whole breadth of the world are staking claims in it, and thus a lot of the contention and animosity that has always existed in the real world now finally shows up here too.
- antod 4y ago
  > The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world. Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms. Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on each other they mostly overlap - and both seem hell bent on ruining the other.

ipython 4y ago

Ah, #jeopardy brings back a lot of great memories. Met a lot of great people back in the day playing that on irc. Canter and Siegel- two names that don’t mean much to people nowadays but that was a turning point in the “spam” industry. I still have my copy of the Whole Internet Catalog on my bookshelf. It’s a great reminder of where we’ve come from. I’ll have to share it with my kids some day. Thanks for the trip back memory lane.

mattl 4y ago

> This Just In. Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world's leaders, politicians, and CEOs. Randy still has a very similar newsletter. https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-interview/ https://tedium.co/2020/01/02/this-is-true-randy-cassingham-i...

abbeyj 4y ago
It appears to be the same newsletter, just renamed: https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/ https://thisistrue.com/trademarked_out_of_a_title/

anthk 4y ago

>Nethack. A dungeon-exploration game to which even non-Dungeons and Dragons fanatics can become addicted. Every adventure game has monsters and magic items, but Nethack has so many monsters, magic items, puzzling situations, and amazing secrets that you'll completely forget about the ASCII graphics. It's the most complex and thought-intensive adventure you'll experience on the Net (to access Nethack, FTP to linc.cis.upenn.edu /pub/NH3.1/binaries; also read rec.games.roguelike.nethack). I still play it today, but under Slashem. A crazy thing: Nethack 3.4.3 was released in 2003 and it was for long THE latest release of Nethack until the 3.6.x banch. Thus, that release was ported to anything capable, from Amigas to Ataris, Windows, DOS, PowerPC Macs, M68k Macs, Solaris boxes, the PSP, Android, iOS... everything. Oh, and the lack of releases until Nethack 3.6.x helped Slashem to develop a lot. >The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000). telnet freechess.org 5000. Same spirit. Use XBoard if you want some GUI. >Software that handles virtually all network functions via one seamless interface will emerge and begin to dominate the commercial Internet marketplace. Netscape and Mozilla Suite. Now Chrome it's almost an OS. For the rest: http://theoldnet.com http://theoldnet.com

quickthrower2 4y ago

I miss /~username/ urls. Also that HTML! <html> <BASE HREF=http://www.mecklerweb.com/mags/iw/v6n1/feat26.htm> <TITLE>v6n1 January 1995 Best and Worst</TITLE> <H1>The Best and Worst of 1994 and Predictions for '95</H1> <I>by Eric Berlin</I><P><I> </I><HR> ... No </P>'s to be found :-)

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gmmeyer 4y ago
it's funny that web browsers parse Ps in there
kristopolous 4y ago
That's in spec for the time. HTML 2.0 draft 00, November 1994: "2.14.1 Paragraph <P> Level 0 The Paragraph element indicates a paragraph. The exact indentation, leading, etc. of a paragraph is not defined and may be a function of other tags, style sheets, etc. Typically, paragraphs are surrounded by a vertical space of one line or half a line. This is typically not the case within the Address element and or is never the case within the Preformatted Text element. With some HTML user agents, the first line in a paragraph is indented. Example of use: <H1>This Heading Precedes the Paragraph</H1> <P>This is the text of the first paragraph. <P>This is the text of the second paragraph. Although you do not need to start paragraphs on new lines, maintaining this convention facilitates document maintenance. <P>This is the text of a third paragraph. " https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-00 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-0... This is still "true". You can't embed a <P> in another <P>. It's special that way. I've never tried it using JS with just an addChild though, I wonder what would happen...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Like the optional semicolon in JS. I am a semicolon guy (and general unfan of JS tricks and shortcuts) but plenty of people prefer not to have them!

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ipaddr 4y ago

Many people miss the early internet and say the magic has been lost. I get that feeling about bbs(es). When they started shutting down because of the internet magic was lost. The early internet was great but already too big.

jamal-kumar 4y ago

My first internet memory is around this time (1994/1995). I was a little kid and I thought I'd check out nasa's website at nasa.com to see some cool space photos - whoops! Someone had camped that domain (The actual one being nasa.gov) for porn.

pcblues 4y ago

They failed to mention (in either the best or worst column, YMMV) alt.binaries.tasteless and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork Well, I could have finished uni a lot quicker without knowing about them.

bradford 4y ago

This excerpt is sure to provoke some opinions: > Worst: Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.

nemothekid 4y ago
I feel like the prediction came true but without any government intervention required.
- anthk 4y ago
  That happened with Spain and Telefonica, the state phone/telco company. Then they opened the teleco sector, prices went down, but then lots of small telecos and ISP's were eaten by the biggest fish, and the prices went a bit higher again (not as high, OFC, until we got a flat rate conn in Spain it was around ~1999). We still don't have a free local call contract for example. SMS' are still paid, but everyone switched into Whatsapp around 10 years ago with smartphones and you get free calls to anywhere in Spain with an $20 internet connection, but not like the US where you have free local calls without doing anything. Today there should be some connection for 10 EUR (~$10?) with a slower bandwidth, not everyone nets a fiber conn. And OFC I would declare 56K internet free, forever, with just a land line. Basic for IRC, Jabber, WA, small web pages, goverment pages such as the ones for applying for dates at the healthcare service, (hello Spanish ministries, you should copy the UK one, it runs on any browser) and so on.

porcoda 4y ago

I remember watching the Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter : that was one of the earliest interesting “live” things I remember seeing on the internet, via Mosaic on my little Slackware Linux workstation at the local university. That was pretty cool. I often remember it when I’m watching current astronomy events unfold live: probes launch or land on mars, or data releases from telescopes.

sbf501 4y ago

I'm amazed how close we came to the CLIPPER chip. That would have undermined literally everything digital. Thanks to everyone who helped kill that.

skywal_l 4y ago
watersb 4y ago
Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"? I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  CLIPPER was encryption. I don’t remember anything about remote kill switches for media (sounds too advanced for 1994), but there was also discussion in the 1990s about the V-chip, which was parental controls for broadcast TV. The technology was implemented but never amounted to much. Turns out parents weren’t any better at programming their TVs than they were their VCRs.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Things were symmetrically encrypted, but the government had an additional decrypt key for EVERY chip made.

Rodeoclash 4y ago

Unbelievably the link for the remote robot arm: Remote Robot Arm (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au) Still resolves to a website related to the project

brabel 4y ago
Very cool! This is interesting as well: "NOTE: The Telelabs System will be closed from late December till the end of February to conserve electrical energy and reduce associated greenhouse emissions."

cnfernandes 4y ago

Apparently “worst of internet” was… “The organization of the World-Wide Web. I love the Web, but finding something specific on it is a nightmare. And because the Web is growing by leaps and bounds, I just don't see things getting easier anytime soon.” Made me smile... especially the last line. :)

rconti 4y ago

> I remember the first time I saw a URL address: http://www.something.something.something http://www.something.something.something. "Ugh," I moaned. "A whole new language I have to learn? I was just getting the hang of Unix!" I immediately resigned myself to the fact that this might be the end of my days in cyberspace. The Net had become somewhat of a runaway locomotive and I was the woman running behind it, screaming for the conductor to please wait! Then suddenly it all came together. A Net guru friend told me about Lynx. "All you have to do," he said, "is type the word 'lynx' at your Unix prompt, and presto! You're into the Web." That weekend I spent about eight hours a day exploring. I quickly found out that you could access all your favorite telnet, FTP, and Gopher sites from the Web, as well as tons of resources you would never find anywhere else on the Net. My cyberlife had changed forever. Fantastic.

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doctor_eval 4y ago
Ha, my experience was quite similar. I was a Unix nerd and a big fan of Gopher, and when the WWW came along I had much the same reaction as TFA. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment with my laptop - I think - and scrolling through lynx while I endured a bout of chickenpox, many years ago. We eventually downloaded and built Mosaic for X-windows, and I still remember the look on my boss' face when we scrolled down in an article about Shoemaker–Levy and there was a photo of it hitting Jupiter. He nearly fell off his chair. So, I suppose that means I've been on the Internet for at least 28 years... ugh.
- rconti 4y ago
  I'm probably only a couple years behind you, as my first shell access was '94 but I had no way to do graphical stuff. Eventually I installed Slackware disksets in '95 and could run Mosaic under X, but needless to say, 4MB of RAM was not really sufficient to do anything. Funny, on that page there's also a quip about "why does everybody feel like their homepage need to have a 100kb image to slow down page loads to a crawl?"

klik99 4y ago

So little has changed. People were predicting that sometime very soon(TM) everyone will be cancelled "just because someone doesn't like their ideas", people still having huge arguments on global warming, "any tragic event" has people who "taunted its seriousness", and Nethack is still awesome.

Shorel 4y ago

> Two new standards; the first for dial-in users, the second for commerce. The two standards are more and more different each year XD Public IP addresses, for example. Big sites have public routeable IPs, end users are behind one or more levels of NAT. You have to pay extra money to be able to be able to open ports 80/443. > All data are Mosaic. What is it about the World-Wide Web that makes everyone want to stick 100-K pictures on their home pages? Add that to the incredible inefficiencies and poor designs of the Gopher and HTTP (WWW) protocols and we see another generation of computing resources torpedoed by the enthusiasm and poor programming of graduate students. Now even the programming languages and runtimes are Web-based! Inefficiencies are compound.

yread 4y ago

> Digital cash will bring home shopping and pay-per-view to the Internet, as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions

Anunayj 4y ago
> as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Well atleast cryptocurrencies solved that.
pjc50 4y ago
Microtransactions for content are never going to take off because of the friction and the potential for microfraud.
- prionassembly 4y ago
  openseas.com

watersb 4y ago

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another 30 pounds and another $1000 for the docking stations and mice and ergonomic plastic monitor stands and Ethernet AUI for your 10BASE-5 Local Area Network. JPEG was not yet a thing. [edit: yes, it was; Netscape Navigator shipped with JPEG support in December 1994. But that's before this original article was released.] Shareware. I actually paid for a license for PKZip! And I bought a Netscape license too -- I think it was 2.0, it was $40. That was their business model: sell browser software. The server happened the following year. NeXTStep Developer License was $3000 per year. Windows MSDN was not free, either. I paid for a $2000 annual subscription at least once. Linux was shaping up remarkably quickly, a rallying point for open source userland tools... but BSDi wasn't free. Any other UNIX was thousands of dollars -- that Open Group industry model. The 1990s were expensive and awkward. I am utterly stunned that it all turned out as well as it has: NeXTStep in every pocket, and Linux in every other pocket, and most tools are free, the Internet everywhere, and strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal. It's not perfect but it was going to be so much worse.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
> Linux in every other pocket Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.
- philwelch 4y ago
  That's because connecting to the internet was a rare, deliberate action for most people and not the default state of every electronic device.
- anthk 4y ago
  Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>The Internet Chess Server. Always near to bursting with activity, you're guaranteed to find a chess mate of your skill level. Brush the cobwebs off your game or challenge a grandmaster. I personally keep a physical chess board handy so I can better visualize the game (to access, telnet to ics.onenet.net 5000). ICS was fantastic back in the day (shout out to FICS that has been great since 1998 and still going). I'll never forget being logged into ICS on 9/11 while watching the towers get hit and chatting on there with different people around the country and the world stunned at what was going on.

eafkuor 4y ago

Is it just me, or is this an incredible prediction for 1994? > Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.

senko 4y ago
"Smart Agents" that will do their owners' bidding where all the rage then. The idea was you'd have this autonomous software robots that would go around searching for information (or do whatever else) you needed on the internet. In terms of technical description, they were closer to today's web3 smart contracts than how Google works. In the end, nothing came of all that hype tho. Turns out it was easier to build Google :-)
smcl 4y ago
The "without the user knowing the source" is an interesting part. Given some popular movements in North America right now you could have ended up with interesting answers for "Who won the 2024 election?", "Is JFK Jr alive?" or "Who is the Head of State in Canada", with a very authoritative-looking Google stamp of approval on it.

OJFord 4y ago

Books about the internet, for sale (only) by email/phone/mail order, brilliant.

martyvis 4y ago

>Best public display/demo of the Internet: The Shoemaker-Levy comet vs. the planet Jupiter We were just getting internet access going at my engineering office, and in a "stop press" submission to our weekly "desktop published" newsletter I submitted some photos of the comet hitting Jupiter I downloaded that day before it made the evening TV news.

dasil003 4y ago

The calm before the storm of the web taking over everything. Interesting to remember how big MUDs were, or gopher, usenet, FTP, etc.

pelasaco 4y ago

The 90s in the internet were awesome. I loved to surf it with my Red Hat or Slackware using lynx and netscape and feel like a real hacker <3

anthk 4y ago
I still use Lynx and Links for that, but with Puffy OS on a netbook :). Luakit for JS masked crapwar... web sites. Oh: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me Have fun :) Addon Gopher site for Lynx, a good place to (re)start Gopher, kinda similar to the web portals from mid-late 90's: gopher://magical.fish

jliptzin 4y ago

But the worst offense is that AOL, like other major on-line services, is taking from the Internet without giving back. Replace AOL here with some other big internet companies I don’t have to name and it’s the same story

tpurves 4y ago

The best part? Nethack still is relevant and IMHO still one of the better video games you can play on the internet. Played it in the 90s, played it off and on again ever since, including this week!

anthk 4y ago
And Slashem, because of new roles/races/tecniques/maps/objects.

lakomen 4y ago

1994 was one of the best years in my life. Sex drugs and Techno. Love Parade, clubbing, being young. If I could turn back time.. If I could find a way.

jedberg 4y ago

> Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game. Oh man, I remember that! I was always pissed that the IRC server I had access to had bad connectivity, and I had bad connectivity to it. Even if I knew the answer right away it was impossible to be first.

jonhohle 4y ago

> A protocol will be developed for smaller interest groups to form larger common-interest federations. How I wish this existed. Something like BBS and online forums, with the ability to create private channels with E2E encryption. There’s probably no commercial viability, but the idea of a common interface for communities sounds awesome.

anthk 4y ago
Private tildes (public Unix machines) with a federated Usenet service do exist. For private "channels", inner mail list with GPG integrated into Mutt. Solved. https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/ They have Usenet, mail, IRC and some sort of local (for use inside a single a server) and federated (the message from a user it's spread across all the federation) BBS'.