4 ms·

> To provide the richness of experience they missed from the 80's/90's locally installed programs. I agree with GP: the 80s and 90s were quite the decades. Bac

> To provide the richness of experience they missed from the 80's/90's locally installed programs. I agree with GP: the 80s and 90s were quite the decades. Back then it was normal to have, say, a 3D modelling / rendering software on your computer (like 3DS Max). And something to create music yourself. And a software allowing you to do DTP (with the 'D' even standing for Desktop). We already had IDEs and some of us had Emacs / vi(m). Computers were used both for work and leisure and they were certainly used in creative ways, to produce "stuff", to experiment. They were more than simply passive devices made to purely consume AI-generated crap. And we already had BBSes then the Internet. We had Usenet newsgroups. By the mid to late 90s we had Nestcape and "alltheweb", then Google. It was local first, but with access to the world's knowledge, basically. And we had games and networked games: I was playing Warcraft II over the Internet in the mid-nineties and Counter-Strike in beta in 1999. At that point it was kinda peak civilization, before the gamification of search engines / enshitification of everything. Lootboxes weren't a thing. Seeing ten zombies mindlessly consuming poor content at a bus stop wasn't a thing yet. And I don't think the move to web-first / browsers-first / ultra-slow mono-threaded JavaScript first (JS was really pathetic at the beginning) empowered users: it was a step back, going years and years back in capabilities compared to what we have locally on our computers. And, today, if you want to create something in 3D, you'll be using Blender. For music, you'll use something local too. For DTP: same thing. Heck, you'll be creating websites / webapps using a mostly local-first solution. I do think this last quarter of a century the Web has destroyed the experience, not enriched it. It has turned users into dumb consumers of content. Sure, I can order stuff on Amazon in two clicks (which I do) and it's more convenient than using eBay to order that video tape of "Le Mans" in the mid nineties (which I did too): but Amazon is just more consumerism. And it's not just dumb consumerism: it's accompanied with total surveillance and insecurity. To me in the 80s and 90s computers had, compared to their capabilities, way more richness of experience than most experience today. What did I not have back then? Hmmm. Access to my broker in real-time: that's one I use a lot. Oh, wait, I'm using my broker's desktop app. As a fun sidenote, HN would have worked fine on Netscape in the nineties. I could have typed this comment on a 486. The "richness" of the enshitified Web: I just don't see it. We had the Web. And it was a better Web.

bee_rider 2y ago
I was a kid at the time so my glasses may be quite rosy. But, it was cool how much space had no computers in it. I was a nerdy kid, and always looking forward to getting back to my computer. But, now there’s no escaping the things. Or going back to them.
katzenversteher 2y ago
Maybe I'm just getting old and it's all nostalgia but I had exactly the same experiences during the 80s and 90s. I also thought web forums where a big step backwards when compared to usenet groups. In pre-internet times I loved reading computer magazines, sure they where full of ads and hyped some bullshit products but at least there where no clickbait titles or AI generated articles. There was some real useful content. You also kind of knew all the authors of the magazines and their style. Software piracy also was a physical process, we shared floppy disks on the schoolyard and exchanged "arcane" knowledge of how to unpack it (arj / pkzip). I also often wonder if as a civilization we really need this enormous speedup of everything. We humans can barely handle multitasking. We can compile huge amounts of ultra complex code insanely fast but we can't think faster to come up with the ideas and also can't handle complexity in our minds better than before. On the contrary, I often feel urged to rush software development.
meiraleal 2y ago
> We had the Web. And it was a better Web. That was an elitist Web. That's not a better Web.

bee_rider 2y ago

I was a kid at the time so my glasses may be quite rosy. But, it was cool how much space had no computers in it. I was a nerdy kid, and always looking forward to getting back to my computer. But, now there’s no escaping the things. Or going back to them.

katzenversteher 2y ago

Maybe I'm just getting old and it's all nostalgia but I had exactly the same experiences during the 80s and 90s. I also thought web forums where a big step backwards when compared to usenet groups. In pre-internet times I loved reading computer magazines, sure they where full of ads and hyped some bullshit products but at least there where no clickbait titles or AI generated articles. There was some real useful content. You also kind of knew all the authors of the magazines and their style. Software piracy also was a physical process, we shared floppy disks on the schoolyard and exchanged "arcane" knowledge of how to unpack it (arj / pkzip). I also often wonder if as a civilization we really need this enormous speedup of everything. We humans can barely handle multitasking. We can compile huge amounts of ultra complex code insanely fast but we can't think faster to come up with the ideas and also can't handle complexity in our minds better than before. On the contrary, I often feel urged to rush software development.

meiraleal 2y ago

> We had the Web. And it was a better Web. That was an elitist Web. That's not a better Web.