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The Internet ruined everything. If I have any regrets in my life, it was not fully appreciating the magic that was the 1990s in the moments I experienced them.
by dade_ 3y ago
The Internet ruined everything. If I have any regrets in my life, it was not fully appreciating the magic that was the 1990s in the moments I experienced them.
- louthy 3y agoPerhaps you’re not fully appreciating the 2020s right now?
- ninkendo 3y agoToday we’re younger than we’re ever gonna be.
- erichanson 3y agoYou're older than you've ever been and now you're even older. -TMBG
- acheron 3y agoOlder than I once was, but younger than I’ll be, that’s not unusual.
- artificialLimbs 3y agoEvery moment of our lives are unusual. It is nearly statistically impossible that we even exist.
- erichanson 3y agoI ran a BBS in the 90s, nothing big but it had a small local community, some of them just users (lusers) and some of the sysops of other boards. I only had one phone line but call waiting would just kick the user off if I got a call. It was really easy to one up, I was running Renegade but there were quite a few different systems that you just basically turn on and you're up. I spent way too much time customizing each menu with ANSI art for each menu and trying to pimp out the UX. There were multiplayer games and file boards and message boards and you could live-chat with the sysop or other users if the board had multiple phone lines. My buddy called long distance to Kansas to some warez board to download a paint program and ran up a huge phone bill. It was magical and so much fun. Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream. Plug a Raspberry Pi into your cable modem and build your own little board, give access to whoever you want. Would be pretty cool to me, but I don't know if I'm just old and nostalgic or if anybody else would actually want to do it. But yeah, wild wild west was the best.
- ipaddr 3y agoI ran a small board. Was fun but tried to do too much on 1541 (mods (games), and messages). I miss the 800 backdoors people put on party lines on. Hitting a newspaper box in a certain spot so it would open free. BBS meetups. War dialing. Local zines that were really cool programs
- epcoa 3y agoThere were private FTP and IRC bots, DC++, etc. Private Minecraft and other game servers are still pretty common. > Internet still has not achieved that kind of decentralized p2p in the mainstream. BBSes were never mainstream. Personal computing in the 80s and early 90s was not mainstream. This is the insurmountable problem in trying to recapture that experience.
- rabite 3y agoWhat I feel the most sadness for is that I will never be able to share with my kids the magic of 90s internet. It feels like the classic bluegrass song "Old Home Place". The place I came from is gone and it is irreparable. The internet was a pristine wonder that is now a dilapidated strip mall.
- idiotsecant 3y agoIf there's anything I've learned (and it might very well be the only thing) its that life is just a long string of homes you can never go back to. Enjoy living in the moment because its the only thing that's real. Reminiscing is quicksand for the soul.
- ergonaught 3y agoI regret selling my multiline BBS instead of pivoting to dialup ISP, but it was pretty clear that BBSs were not going to “survive” after 96 or so. Ran them since the early 80s and really loved the “online communities” we had. Difficult to recapture that experience in today’s environs.
- xwdv 3y agoWhat exactly would you have done differently to appreciate the magic?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 3y agoMost BBSs can be accessed by telnet now. What's stopping you?