4 ms·

This is nicely written, and the style is fresh after a year of reading LLM writing whenever I click. Interesting to me is the audience - this article is approp

by vessenes 10mo ago

This is nicely written, and the style is fresh after a year of reading LLM writing whenever I click. Interesting to me is the audience - this article is appropriate for a middle schooler on up to read, and assumes no technical knowledge at all, or very little. Documentation targets and the social culture around them have varied since I started reading documents like these, but this sets an especially low bar for reader knowledge. I like it. On the one hand, I could have gotten much more technical detail out of a version that used industry-specific words and was half the length, but on the other, I got what i needed, and learned much about the author to boot.

doublerabbit 10mo ago
2003 was a completely different era for technical detail. That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations. People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave . Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it. Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP, pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl. Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and not just a rehashed Android UI. Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again blaming whoever. Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those days. /me goes and scours sourceforge
- johnisgood 10mo ago
  I agree with everything you said, apart from "That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.". I do not agree with it, because it applied to many open source projects. And yeah, remember Eggdrop? :D
  - doublerabbit 10mo ago
    I do, I never understood it then, I do now. Hybrid Ircd is what I used for my server. You were cool if you used Ratbox, and Unreal I never unstood why you needed +a and +q Documentation was never fun so I'll use my age as an alibi. I was just a script kiddie and recalling downloading MB's of scripts and uploading them on to polarhome [0] where some awesome swede was hosting shell access to different systems on his home DSL. Me kitted with my three-hour limited 56k and my fathers work 128K ISDN line. Oh well, nostalgia over back to work, writing IT architecture docs. [0] http://www.polarhome.com http://www.polarhome.com
- dogleash 10mo ago
  > Where did we go wrong Driving character out of the software world. Spotify couldn't whip the llama's ass even if it wanted to. And it doesn't want to. Spotify is a boring office worker that we're professionally cordial with only because they run the stockroom.
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    If you looked at 'old' software companies that existed at 2000, they were boring companies like IBM. Really what most people don't want to admit is most of the software world grew up and got old.
- vessenes 10mo ago
  I’m 50, and I can tell you exactly what happened - AOL. Plus the death of the BBS. Usenet started changing radically in the late 90s, and the independence BBS operators had wasn’t appealing enough to keep them running dial up services, nor was it generally appealing enough to keep people logging in over modem when the baby internet was available. All that said, I want to be clear that I’m still partial to TCL - an elegant highly usable language, and happy to fight you over it.
deltarholamda 10mo ago
It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted. I won't take it for granted now. As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)
- vessenes 10mo ago
  Samba was arguably the way Linux snuck into corporations in the late 90s. Microsoft’s server offerings were truly terrible in that era, compared to getting a very functional Unix-a-like for free out of commodity hardware. Terrible and expensive. The issue was, you needed to be able to do group file sharing to windows desktops, full stop. IT teams wanted Linux, bad, for nerd and quality of life reasons. They also wanted Apache, not IIS. As Samba stabilized, Linux boxen quietly started appearing without notice or fanfare, and never left.

doublerabbit 10mo ago

2003 was a completely different era for technical detail. That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations. People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave . Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it. Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP, pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl. Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and not just a rehashed Android UI. Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again blaming whoever. Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those days. /me goes and scours sourceforge

johnisgood 10mo ago
I agree with everything you said, apart from "That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.". I do not agree with it, because it applied to many open source projects. And yeah, remember Eggdrop? :D
- doublerabbit 10mo ago
  I do, I never understood it then, I do now. Hybrid Ircd is what I used for my server. You were cool if you used Ratbox, and Unreal I never unstood why you needed +a and +q Documentation was never fun so I'll use my age as an alibi. I was just a script kiddie and recalling downloading MB's of scripts and uploading them on to polarhome [0] where some awesome swede was hosting shell access to different systems on his home DSL. Me kitted with my three-hour limited 56k and my fathers work 128K ISDN line. Oh well, nostalgia over back to work, writing IT architecture docs. [0] http://www.polarhome.com http://www.polarhome.com
dogleash 10mo ago
> Where did we go wrong Driving character out of the software world. Spotify couldn't whip the llama's ass even if it wanted to. And it doesn't want to. Spotify is a boring office worker that we're professionally cordial with only because they run the stockroom.
- pixl97 10mo ago
  If you looked at 'old' software companies that existed at 2000, they were boring companies like IBM. Really what most people don't want to admit is most of the software world grew up and got old.
vessenes 10mo ago
I’m 50, and I can tell you exactly what happened - AOL. Plus the death of the BBS. Usenet started changing radically in the late 90s, and the independence BBS operators had wasn’t appealing enough to keep them running dial up services, nor was it generally appealing enough to keep people logging in over modem when the baby internet was available. All that said, I want to be clear that I’m still partial to TCL - an elegant highly usable language, and happy to fight you over it.

deltarholamda 10mo ago

It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted. I won't take it for granted now. As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)

vessenes 10mo ago
Samba was arguably the way Linux snuck into corporations in the late 90s. Microsoft’s server offerings were truly terrible in that era, compared to getting a very functional Unix-a-like for free out of commodity hardware. Terrible and expensive. The issue was, you needed to be able to do group file sharing to windows desktops, full stop. IT teams wanted Linux, bad, for nerd and quality of life reasons. They also wanted Apache, not IIS. As Samba stabilized, Linux boxen quietly started appearing without notice or fanfare, and never left.