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> intelligent people [...] was the primary population of many (most?) websites. Oh sweet summer child.
by chx 3y ago
> intelligent people [...] was the primary population of many (most?) websites.
Oh sweet summer child.
- derefr 3y agoGP post is correct in the general sense that the Internet used to be a thing only accessible to researchers at major universities; and therefore a place where everyone could be assumed to have some basic level of technical knowledge (if not common sense), and to consider themselves "an intellectual" of some kind or another. GP post is technically incorrect, though, in that during this time, the web didn't exist yet. The tech folks were on Usenet and IRC, not on "websites." (In fact, the creation of the web and "Eternal September" basically coincided: the web was the killer app that got regular people to sign up for Internet service. Despite HTML being designed for scientific-research use-cases, the web that actually formed in practice was "for normals" from the very beginning.)
- chx 3y agoI came online, completely accidentally with the Eternal September crowd, we beta tested NCSA Mosaic mostly as a Usenet reader 'cos there were almost no websites yet. Still it was not only researchers, "Eternal" September is a reaction to earlier Septembers with a large influx of newbies. And even then there flame wars were a thing.