One thing you almost -never- saw then was this: "Hey guys, check out this thing X I made with absolutely no reason other than to see if I could and to understa

One thing you almost -never- saw then was this: "Hey guys, check out this thing X I made with absolutely no reason other than to see if I could and to understand Y problem better" replies: - "idk why anybody would do this when you could use Xify.net's free tier" - "you could have simply done this with these unix tools and a few shell scripts, but whatever creams your twinkie" - "just use nix" Instead what we had were cheers, and comments delayed while people devoured the code to see what hooked you in, and general congratulations- most often this lead to other things and enlightened conversations. Everything's always been a 'competition' so to speak, but we weren't shoving eachother into the raceway barriers like we do now on the way to the finish line. There was a lot more finishing together.