My mentor at a small ISP in the early 2000s had friends and sites like this. I even remember Monkey.org specifically. I honestly feel like I grew up in the ruins of the old internet - too young to be a old beard and too old to be a digg/Reddit user and far too old to be a Twitter-er. Quake was too old and half-life was too new. I’ve always wanted to write about my lack of community - a sysadmin after sysadmins went extinct and the oldest of the devops - but I fear like the subject of the essay - no one would be around to read it.
I miss the old goons I grew up idolizing. Wonder where they are now - with their children and their CTO positions.
Don’t take community or friends for granted. Y’all Monkeys are luckier than you know.
I feel exactly the same way. My brother is ten years older than me, so I discovered the Internet at a very young age. It was like a science fiction western, filled to the brim with hackers and webmasters.
Once I grew up and became a developer, I never found a community like the ones I saw when I was a kid. To me, even open-source projects often look like corporate projects in comparison. There was a sense of excitement back then that no longer exists today - or at least, I can't seem to find it.
I am filled with nostalgia whenever I see retro art, like the first edition of Shadowrun books.
I feel the same way, growing up there was an era of excitement and pure passion -- it's like that's lost today. That's why I've been trying to build up a list of people who feel the same and making a tiny channel for it.
I feel the same way. Nowadays everything seems corporate and advertiser-friendly like a cyberpunk city.
I miss the forums I used to participate in during early 2000s. It was a profoundly human experience with good and bad moments. It's also the reason I speak english today. Found multiple communities dedicated to a video game series I liked. There were boards about everything, from the games themselves to fan creations and the almighty off-topic board. All kinds of people frequented these places. I remember I got to know many of them. Sometimes while I'm browsing reddit I recognize an old nickname from those days and I am tempted to send a PM.
I started just right I suppose. My first modem was 28k. Windows 95 was just out (I had used win 3.1 a bit before that). Slackware was my Linux distribution. I was in high school. Doom was just out. We made Doom maps and dialed each other up to play. My kids are 14 and 9. I am CTO at my own small consulting firm now.
I’m no industry titan, but I have been around the block. Many came before me, but I have seen the modern Internet rise from almost nothing. We all have to start somewhere. I still use Reddit, guess I am too old for it, but I started when it was all about programming, and had just launched. I was a developer first, but also a sysadmin for a startup. Did that from 2000-2006, before we called it DevOps. Someone had to keep the servers up. I was huge into MUDs and coding/building them... I actually kept track of a couple of the people I played with over all these years, but only a couple.
YC, Paul Graham, and the entrepreneurial spirit is built into me now. I read every Pg essay when it came out. In my career I only worked at a larger company for a few years in my 22 year career in tech this far. Tech is weird some days.
Now get off my lawn and all you kids stop using NoSQL and JavaScript and quit writing electron apps ;)
Gosh I started with a 2600 bps. I think I still have it. It was given to me since the ones out in market were 28kpbs (expensive). Eventually I got a 14.4 kbps. I felt like I was flying.
I did some free work for someone. The logo was for "Digi(something)" ... is it one of you monkey's?
I used QuarXPress and Photoshop. One of the first software I used and installed on a 3.5 disk. At a young age this was exciting tech time for me.
Heh, kind of glad I started when I did. 14.4 and up modems really were quite usable back then, for what the web was. I still remember waiting for big files like MUD source code. Also, I remember installed Slackware with a dozen or so floppy disks :)
Started with 300 and was insanely jealous of people when 1200 became affordable enough for them. I think I eventually got 1200, but then many people had moved to 2400.
Started w/sleepover's at my buddy's house dialing into the mainframe to play Adventure on his Dad's terminal w/acoustic coupler modem. Pretty sure it was slower than 300.
I had 300 baud, which had a switch on the side. I would call a BBS and flip it on when it made the handshake beeps. I tried to host a BBS of my own between the hours of 7pm and 9pm, but my parents were not happy with it.
Can we please come together and form a sort of tilde club on IPFS oder the Dat protocol?
Like "The Well" for today, with intelligent, respectful conversations in a format that is not as toxic as 140 characters and no sane threading?
So that the protocol itself will filter away the eternal septemberists?
And can we please make it uncomfortable for the "I need total anonymity for my free speech conspiracy BS", so that we also keep these nutcracks away from our community?
I actually signed up for The Well a while ago, just to see what it was all about. Unfortunately it felt very stagnant, IMHO. I guess its heyday is over.
A side note: The internet sure was a different place back then. Content was not made for ads like it is now! People posted stuff for everyone to share, and the best stuff rose to the top. I really miss the early internet before the ads came.
I can relate - most of the internet and communities I knew from the late 90s to early 2000s are gone. I'm not very fond of Reddit, but Twitter is quite welcoming to the middle-aged too!
I joined HN after feeling the /. community that I had loved became too... negative and political than I liked. I asked around about another community and that's when I first learned about HN.
I think I kind of understand what you mean, but your similes don't really make sense. Far too old to be a Twitterer? Donald Trump would beg to differ. Quake (1996) and Half-Life (1998) are also not far enough apart to be generation-defining. In the end, if you fail to be accepted by a community, you can always find reasons for it, but you can never be sure if you're correct about them...
BTW, I find this (mostly) American tendency to divvy up people into strict categories by their age very strange: boomers, gen. X/Y/Z, millennials etc., each with their own stereotypes. Which leads to even more alienation when people look at these (and other) stereotypes and think that they don't fit in because they don't recognize themselves in them. Of course they don't, because every person is unique!
I'm probably a similar age, I remember growing up reading NTK while feeling too young to be a part of all that, then by the time I grew older it was gone.
Yeah, I was about to say they came out around the same time. Even Doom and Quake is only three years apart, but I feel like it was much more. Maybe because I was younger at the time.
But it's possible they did not get online until much later.
My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993).
But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.
I didn't get online until 95-96 I think, I'm just 2 years older and for example I completely missed the BBS thing because living in a small town phone costs were prohibitive but by the time dial-up became a thing there were the first nightly flat-rates (like from 8PM to 8AM at an affordable price) so we went online almost daily. But online gaming wasn't possible anyway, I remember throwing some LAN-party with my closest friends to multi-play Quake but that's it. But I didn't feel I was too old for Quake at all
I miss the old goons I grew up idolizing. Wonder where they are now - with their children and their CTO positions.
Don’t take community or friends for granted. Y’all Monkeys are luckier than you know.