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Bloody hell, talk about rose-colored glasses. No, back in the nineties, you could not do any of the things he talks about. Not unless you were a high-status em

Bloody hell, talk about rose-colored glasses. No, back in the nineties, you could not do any of the things he talks about. Not unless you were a high-status employee of a handful of major corporations or universities. Most people couldn't get online at all, and those who could were lucky to have client-only access to e-mail and the web. Nowadays, anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account can set up an always-online server running pretty much any software they choose. The Internet is far more decentralized, by the criteria he invokes, then it was back then.

dasil003 12y ago
He never said it was cheap and accessible, what he said was that it was decentralized. In other words, no one could stop you from doing any of those things, the fact that it was harder to get online is beside the point. The vast majority of services were running open protocols, and there were really no gatekeepers except for DNS I suppose, but even that is a decentralized protocol even if the registry is centralized by necessity.
kragen 12y ago
Your experience may have been limited, although I am not going to claim that mine was typical. As I explained in the article, I did the things I talked about (running online services, including email and web pages, accessible from the entire internet) with a US$20/month dialup internet account on an ISP run by a group of MUDders who ran the ISP as a way to play MUDs, starting in 1997. I installed my first web server (from EIT's Webmaster's Starter Kit) temporarily on an IRIX workstation in a university computer lab, in 1994. I was an undergraduate student at UNM, a state university in the second-poorest state in the US, although I admit UNM was unusually progressive. The year before, I was an unpaid student system administration intern, with a user account on all the Suns at the math department, assigned tasks like "please get tvtwm to compile on SunOS 4.1.4; Prof X wants to use it". I agree that it's pretty awesome that anyone who wants to pay Amazon or DigitalOcean US$5 a month (and can get access to a credit card they'll accept) can run any internet-facing server software they want. Unless they're WikiLeaks, say. Or infringing on an invalid Amazon software patent. Or just want to not have random employees have hardware access to their machine for reasons of security and privacy. So I don't think the internet is far more decentralized. It's bigger, which is pretty great, and it's a lot cheaper, which is even better, but it's also more centralized.

dasil003 12y ago

He never said it was cheap and accessible, what he said was that it was decentralized. In other words, no one could stop you from doing any of those things, the fact that it was harder to get online is beside the point. The vast majority of services were running open protocols, and there were really no gatekeepers except for DNS I suppose, but even that is a decentralized protocol even if the registry is centralized by necessity.

kragen 12y ago

Your experience may have been limited, although I am not going to claim that mine was typical. As I explained in the article, I did the things I talked about (running online services, including email and web pages, accessible from the entire internet) with a US$20/month dialup internet account on an ISP run by a group of MUDders who ran the ISP as a way to play MUDs, starting in 1997. I installed my first web server (from EIT's Webmaster's Starter Kit) temporarily on an IRIX workstation in a university computer lab, in 1994. I was an undergraduate student at UNM, a state university in the second-poorest state in the US, although I admit UNM was unusually progressive. The year before, I was an unpaid student system administration intern, with a user account on all the Suns at the math department, assigned tasks like "please get tvtwm to compile on SunOS 4.1.4; Prof X wants to use it". I agree that it's pretty awesome that anyone who wants to pay Amazon or DigitalOcean US$5 a month (and can get access to a credit card they'll accept) can run any internet-facing server software they want. Unless they're WikiLeaks, say. Or infringing on an invalid Amazon software patent. Or just want to not have random employees have hardware access to their machine for reasons of security and privacy. So I don't think the internet is far more decentralized. It's bigger, which is pretty great, and it's a lot cheaper, which is even better, but it's also more centralized.