ZH isn’t what it used to be, and of course the change of ownership had a lot to do with that, and now it’s at a place where you can’t read a single comment thread without someone else commenting “You’ve only been signed up six weeks newb, go back to chairman zog” or some such.
This was the death of slashdot too, back in the day with my barely 5 digit ID, it had been low 4 digit ID’s when I started reading but never signed up, and the only time it was ever funny was when someone with one of the new high 6 digit ID’s got snarked by someone with a low 6 digit ID, who got snarked by someone with a mid 5 digit ID, who got snarked by me with my barely 5 digit ID, who got snarked by a couple of 4 digit ID’s, and some guy with a 2 digit ID came along and said something like fucking kids, git orf my lawn.
Of course that had nothing to do with the subject, but it was notable that 10,000 and below, all the snarks were “dude, who gives a fuck what your number is” and all the 50,000 and above were “you will respect mah seniority”
Sadly it isn’t entirely true that the same thing is not true for countries and culture and history, so you have the USA and Australia and New Zealand and Israel, who can lord it over Bosnia as being a newb, then the Chinese guys pops up and says dude, we had fiat currencies 2,000 years ago, and we are still here.
Of course a lot of this depends on who teaches you the histories your learned, in the sixties and seventies in the UK it didn’t matter if you went to a state school or the best private schools, you’d have been taught about the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages that followed, and yes it was all capitalised like that.
If you were taught at private catholic schools run by monks (I was) you were taught by an organisation that had its own set of records going back 1700 years or so, and you were taught that the Dark Ages were by and large anything but dark, there was plenty of light and intellect floating around, but not being part of Empire it wasn’t formally recorded and tallied.
I had a similar conversation a year or so ago with a newb technology wise, bear in mind I started with BBS’s so I have lived through it all, actually I started with slide rules and log tables, VLSI gave us portable calculators and so on and it moved on from there, so I had used thousand buck acoustic couplers long before I got amazed at 400 buck 900 baud modems and so on.
I also had a very low 5 digit CompuServe account.
From 1990 to around 1995 and Microsoft Windows “Chicago” 95a on 13 floppies “the internet” was in the “Dark Ages” and today it isn’t really possible to explain or demonstrate to anyone what it was like, you were either there, or you weren’t.
As someone who was, those so called “Dark Ages” of the internet were the most exciting and intellectually stimulating period of my life, I really, genuinely, mean that.
Imagine a medium where the barriers to entry were such that corporations could afford to do it, but saw no reason to even if they knew of its existence, and by corporations I do not just mean Ford, I mean advertising and so on.
Imagine a medium where there weren’t any laws of rules, just personal choices, people like Bill Gates liked the idea of IP, lots of others of similar stature didn’t, but nobody was in a position to enforce anything (BTW old billy and MS didn’t “miss out” on “the internet” in the early days, they just didn’t see *any* way to be involved and still protect their IP) and it was a pure anarchy, and I mean that in the most beautiful sense.
I made contact with *lots* of people all over the globe, some of whom are household names now, some of whom are dead now, some of whom are still just regular guys doing their thing… what!!! you have daughters of fuckable age?? what the fuck dude, it was only yesterday you were in your late teens and trying to install Chicago on a 286…
There was a certain “hail fellow, well met” just by dint of the fact that you had managed to get everything working and get yourself online, remember Windows 3.1 was still two years in the future in 1989/90, and people were online BEFORE the whole WWW hypertext thing, so when it came out you’d often use a gateway from the system you were in to this new web stuff.
It was shades of some extra solar planet in a alien system where disgruntled humans has left earth in disgust and gotten themselves to the new planet, by definition of the fact you had got there, everyone else welcomed you as one of them.
Then along came AOL and FreeServe (in the uk) and fucked it all up for everyone, in the name of corporate greed.
Suddenly planet X is flooded with immigrants by the million, and whatever history there was before their arrival is both erased and dismissed, and if it is ever mentioned again it will be the “Dark Ages” before the enlightened ones with their Assholes On Line CD’s turned up. “me too!!!” lol
And it started, people who has been using usenet for many years got shunted aside by the newbs, I remember well the time in late 95 early 96 where a bunch of (newb) people gathered together to tell me that me and my opinions were no longer welcome in their newsgroup…. when a buddy went to great lengths and posted detailed descriptions and RFD and everything else showing beyond all possible doubt that I was the person who did 99% of the legwork in creating that newsgroup and having it approved and added to the pools worldwide, he was accused of being my “bot” and nobody with a fucking brain would believe all that garbage anyways…. I still stick my head in that group every 12 months or so, it’s totally fucking dead, except for some mental case that is probably one of the original wasters having conversations with himself about past slights he has suffered etc.
(image, 1999 warez app)
Google Groups archival of that stuff is basically non existent, most of the content is gone, I was a small scale ISP back then so I still have *some* of my backups of websites and software and shit from circa 1998-9, but before that it’s all gone and that’s my own stuff, and of course my stash isn’t available online.
So that’s another definition of Dark Ages, if you weren’t there yourself, you can be told absolutely anything about it, and you have no way to fact check any of it.
I could sit here and talk about MasterCard v Microsoft and the very real at the time battle to create true smart cards (eg SOC integrated into credit card form factor) in 1999, and mention words like ultron and java, but where does it leave you? If you yourself haven’t heard of it before, what do you look for (1988 nist doc will help you narrow it down) and why would you even look anyway, given just a single data point, how significant can it be?
I can remember talking to a Russian in around 1988, and I can remember this one because even in a text based medium it comes across quite clearly when the other guy goes from thinking you’re probably a smart guy who just needs some pointers, to thinking you’re a fucking retard, because I’d never heard of a supervolcano, you have heard of yellowstone, yes? well of course, us national park, old faithful and all that, what’s that got to do with this supervolcano stuff….. you were not taught this in school in physical geography lessons???/ ummm, no…..
So maybe that and some other guy talking about planet nbiru is the real reason none of this shit is available today, maybe the dark ages were just a cover up for alien landings and free sex and beer for all.
Or maybe we just discard shit that is not of immediate use, and then what else do you have left but assuming seniority based on time in place?
I got here first, so I know more than you, so shut the fuck up and listen to your betters, newb….
In essence we have created a hierarchical system for ourselves, which is hugely ironic, because back in those now lost Dark Ages of the net such a thing would have been unimaginable in the anarchic free for all that it was, and that we all loved.
Incredibly, left to ourselves and bereft of any kind of laws or control, far from being awash with bomb plans, hardcore kiddie porn and terrorist sedition, I don’t actually remember coming across any of that shit, ever, anywhere, it was only when the AOL’ers started coming on line that some turn digitised the jolly roger cookbook and before you knew it 99 varieties of shit that didn’t work as advertised (obvious to anyone with 3rd year chemistry or physics) was all over th3 place.
Now we have yutube channels full of the modern version of jolly roger, and I have NO interest it crypto-currency, but I suspect it is just more of the same, fun and interesting the first few years, now everyone AOL me too is piling in to cryptocurrency and it’s turning to shit faster than you can say UART.
What will happen to this small corner of wordpress when a goalpost gets moved? It gets deleted and is gone forever as though it never was, and only those who used something like teleport pro to make a local copy will ever know it existed.
And then, how will you know that the copy you are given matches the original? It could so easily be an edited version.
Still, there is always the old / new fallback.
I got here first, fucking newb…
