using computers in 2024 as someone who used to use computers in 2004 is extremely frustrating and depressing
@mavica_again i find using computers is a lot more fun when you're not using a bunch of awful programs and services that make you feel like you're being spied on and manipulated for money
It wasn't always that way though.
Heck, forget 2004, rewind back to 1994!
@lispi314@udongein.xyz
In 1994, proprietary computers (e.g. Commodore Amigas, Silicon Graphics [if you, or more likely your school or maybe employer because those things were insanely expensive] as just a couple of vendors which come to mind) were still pretty friggin awesome!
Linux existed in 1994 @IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net but Macs were worse than they are now. Windows was (and always has been, and always will be) a dumpster fire.
IMHO, Linux seemed like absolute knock off trash when you could have been running IRIX or SunOS or heck if you were really esoteric and fully of moneybags, you could still buy a Symbolics Lisp Machine related stuff in 1994 (the UX1200 VMEBus Board for Suns was 1990, the MacIvory III Nubus Board for Apple Macintoshes was 1991 and if you were INSANELY rich [e.g. my first college only had one DEC Alpha] you could run Symbolics' Virtual Lisp Machine emulator under Tru64 for OpenGenera goodness)
You weren't being spied on or manipulated for money by pretty much any of those proprietary vendors, amazingly.
You had to worry more about vestiges of convicted monopoly AT&T RBOCs maybe doing log correlation for your phreaking (which, really almost never happened. I remember my first employer after I graduated from University in 1999 getting mag tapes mailed to them from SBC for trying to trace fraud; and that employer didn't have ANYTHING to read such tapes, because they were a start up from the 1990s, not some legacy backwater entrenched monopolistic legacy remnant with hardware going back to the 1950s and earlier).
Candidly, while it still stinks that Commodore declared bankruptcy in 1994?
Having an AGA Amiga around then and being online was a grand old time.
AmiNet was, for that era, the largest online software repository to have ever existed!
IRC? Was full of folks, well, full enough. People had a clue too! Some (e.g. @scanner@apricot.social) I probably first crossed paths with on EFNet in the early 1990s?
Discord didn't exist.
Even commercial networks (e.g. Prodigy, CompuServe) were basically trash as contrasted with what you could find via IRC, NNTP, FTP.
The web? Had barely taken off. Nutscrape (sorry, Netscape) was just starting to gestate from the remnants of the much purer academia/research NCSA Mosiac, but if you happened to have access to a lab running NeXTSTEP on some 486 dx2 @ 66MHz that ran circles around an actual overpriced NeXT or dogshit slow NeXTstation Color Turbo? You could run something such as Omniweb and have a web experience that wasn't 100% garbage! (Probably still like, 80% garbage, but I remember one website with some anime still frames that if you scrolled at the right right in Omniweb, almost looked as if they were animating! Almost!). Anyway, since the web was still barely a thing, that meant that the advertisers and SEO and such hadn't turned it into a total dumpster fire too.
1994? Was it the apogee of personal computing? I dunno, but it was pretty close to that. I was not so fortunate, but a friend got an Amiga 4000/040 for xmas circa 1992 I think it was and his place seemed like the place to be. The kind of set up that made Doogie Howser, M.D. on TV with his Apple IIgs look like a chucklefuck chump. But that friend was way beyond 1337. Still is no doubt.
1994 wasn't all sunshine and roses. NetBSD existed but that is also when Theo got ejected from core, though thankfully that brought the world OpenBSD, which did eliminated so much of the low hanging fruit security holes that made UNIX systems better for compromising than they were to administer.
Srsly though, the vibes I had with an Amiga 2000, something like Terminus running, AmiTCP (a BSD derived TCP stack, natch), DeliTracker bumpin MODs, DiskMaster 2 (far more extensible than what web browsers were, from image displaying to hex editing and more) while running ncftp, telnet and more? Extremely good memories. Computing has rarely ever achieved that level of enjoyment before or since for me personally.
2004? sigh SILC still seemed promising at least. Almost everything else online has been consternation and damnation and I wouldn't mind seeing wiped out of existence.
@mjdxp@labyrinth.zone
CC: @mavica_again@computerfairi.es
Heck, forget 2004, rewind back to 1994!
@lispi314@udongein.xyz
In 1994, proprietary computers (e.g. Commodore Amigas, Silicon Graphics [if you, or more likely your school or maybe employer because those things were insanely expensive] as just a couple of vendors which come to mind) were still pretty friggin awesome!
Linux existed in 1994 @IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net but Macs were worse than they are now. Windows was (and always has been, and always will be) a dumpster fire.
IMHO, Linux seemed like absolute knock off trash when you could have been running IRIX or SunOS or heck if you were really esoteric and fully of moneybags, you could still buy a Symbolics Lisp Machine related stuff in 1994 (the UX1200 VMEBus Board for Suns was 1990, the MacIvory III Nubus Board for Apple Macintoshes was 1991 and if you were INSANELY rich [e.g. my first college only had one DEC Alpha] you could run Symbolics' Virtual Lisp Machine emulator under Tru64 for OpenGenera goodness)
You weren't being spied on or manipulated for money by pretty much any of those proprietary vendors, amazingly.
You had to worry more about vestiges of convicted monopoly AT&T RBOCs maybe doing log correlation for your phreaking (which, really almost never happened. I remember my first employer after I graduated from University in 1999 getting mag tapes mailed to them from SBC for trying to trace fraud; and that employer didn't have ANYTHING to read such tapes, because they were a start up from the 1990s, not some legacy backwater entrenched monopolistic legacy remnant with hardware going back to the 1950s and earlier).
Candidly, while it still stinks that Commodore declared bankruptcy in 1994?
Having an AGA Amiga around then and being online was a grand old time.
AmiNet was, for that era, the largest online software repository to have ever existed!
IRC? Was full of folks, well, full enough. People had a clue too! Some (e.g. @scanner@apricot.social) I probably first crossed paths with on EFNet in the early 1990s?
Discord didn't exist.
Even commercial networks (e.g. Prodigy, CompuServe) were basically trash as contrasted with what you could find via IRC, NNTP, FTP.
The web? Had barely taken off. Nutscrape (sorry, Netscape) was just starting to gestate from the remnants of the much purer academia/research NCSA Mosiac, but if you happened to have access to a lab running NeXTSTEP on some 486 dx2 @ 66MHz that ran circles around an actual overpriced NeXT or dogshit slow NeXTstation Color Turbo? You could run something such as Omniweb and have a web experience that wasn't 100% garbage! (Probably still like, 80% garbage, but I remember one website with some anime still frames that if you scrolled at the right right in Omniweb, almost looked as if they were animating! Almost!). Anyway, since the web was still barely a thing, that meant that the advertisers and SEO and such hadn't turned it into a total dumpster fire too.
1994? Was it the apogee of personal computing? I dunno, but it was pretty close to that. I was not so fortunate, but a friend got an Amiga 4000/040 for xmas circa 1992 I think it was and his place seemed like the place to be. The kind of set up that made Doogie Howser, M.D. on TV with his Apple IIgs look like a chucklefuck chump. But that friend was way beyond 1337. Still is no doubt.
1994 wasn't all sunshine and roses. NetBSD existed but that is also when Theo got ejected from core, though thankfully that brought the world OpenBSD, which did eliminated so much of the low hanging fruit security holes that made UNIX systems better for compromising than they were to administer.
Srsly though, the vibes I had with an Amiga 2000, something like Terminus running, AmiTCP (a BSD derived TCP stack, natch), DeliTracker bumpin MODs, DiskMaster 2 (far more extensible than what web browsers were, from image displaying to hex editing and more) while running ncftp, telnet and more? Extremely good memories. Computing has rarely ever achieved that level of enjoyment before or since for me personally.
2004? sigh SILC still seemed promising at least. Almost everything else online has been consternation and damnation and I wouldn't mind seeing wiped out of existence.
@mjdxp@labyrinth.zone
CC: @mavica_again@computerfairi.es
Follow
@teajaygrey @mjdxp @lispi314 @IceWolf @scanner @mavica_again
> Tru64
> 1991
Something's off here 🤨
@teajaygrey
Oh, don't worry, it was more of a joke 😅
But if I were accurate, I think it was called Digital Unix at the time,I might still have some of its manuals on the bookshelves, it was renamed to Tru64 in the late nineties, some time circa 1998 IIRC
Ah that's good to know (and does seem familiar) but again, if I ever accessed any such systems, it would have been remotely. In 1994 I had probably spent a lot more time in SunOS, IRIX, NeXT/NeXTSTEP and even Linux shells. Most of the DEC hardware I interacted with then (and even up through an employer I had as recently as 2006) was running OpenVMS on such things (eww).
@teajaygrey
Ha-ha-ha! Indeed, I still have a few of these artifacts of the long lost civilization 🤩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Ivory_and_Open_Genera (specifically in the "Ivory Machines" table).
But y'know, I already admitted I never owned such hardware personally. I am not going to nit pick the release dates.
DEC Alpha wasn't released until 1992 I don't think? Presumably Tru64 came around the same time or later. I don't know. I could also never afford such things as also previously alluded. My first college in 1994 had a DEC Alpha (just one running Tru64 as far as I can recall. Maybe it had another running OpenVMS [yuck]?) I wasn't allowed to touch them personally, but I did see one with my own two eyes.
I never used OpenGenera on such systems personally either, only under the AMD64 Linux/OS X emulation shim that someone wrote e.g. something like https://github.com/ynniv/vagrant-opengenera. (I don't remember vagrant being necessary/used either, so it was probably an earlier branch of similar code than that)