using computers in 2024 as someone who used to use computers in 2004 is extremely frustrating and depressing
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
@teajaygrey @lispi314 @scanner @mjdxp @mavica_again Nh, we weren't born in 1994 and I kinda like being able to do normal computer things with our computer. 1994 isn't quite as egregious as the "we should all go back to when you only had BASIC!" people, but still.
I'd say 2004-2006-2010-ish was probably the Good Times. You can see this in game consoles.
The Wii? Respects consent, doesn't force updates. The PS3? Respects consent, doesn't force updates. Mac OS 10.6 was vaguely around that time and didn't have the Gatekeeper crap. It was just an OS.
Jump forward a console generation and the PS4? Pushes updates extremely hard. The Wii U? FORCES updates, Windows style, IIRC. As for Windows? Yeahhhh. And Mac's got Gatekeeper now. It's all about eroding your control of your own devices.
(We have no idea what went on in Xbox land for any of this.)
@teajaygrey @lispi314 @scanner @mjdxp @mavica_again And yes, "doing normal things with our computer" includes internet things, because being able to meet other critters like us is Extremely Fucking Important.
The 1990s were only a golden age if you can find friends in dirtspace and don't need the internet.
Yet, computers being useful, while being offline, was more or less a given. Your discourse of the Wii not forcing updates? I mean, OK, but neither did the Dreamcast (which had the first modem built-in to a video game console), nor every other video game console for decades earlier.
So, if your stipulation is that forced updates are when the "bad times" began? I guess you might want to delineate the Wii-U and later eras? IMHO, as someone who was a Co-SysOp of a BBS which had a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) online gaming was always the pits. If a game isn't good offline, to me, it's not a good game.
Generally speaking, for resilience, I think systems (games or otherwise) should be possible to be utilized offline if they're meaningfully useful.
If I have to be online to utilize something, why?
GPS comes to mind: GPS predates online privacy invasive monitoring (e.g. Google Location Sharing is basically surveillance capitalism spying as a service; not something that has [m]any useful uses which don't cause more harm than good). A good GPS system will still function without an Internet uplink. A bad GPS system, will fail if it isn't online.
"if you can find friends in dirtspace" seems unnecessarily condescending if not downright disrespectful. I made friends in person, and online. If I am being honest, the friends I made online even in the 1990s were far and away higher caliber than those with whom I became acquainted with online post MySpace and so-called "social" networking which algorithmically "curates" feeds to be as divisive and confrontational as possible in order to maximize "engagement" so that surveillance capitalism vendors can monetize their users; making hostile "debates" the norm instead of flame wars being rare and usually avoided in previous forms of online discourse which were still common place and widespread, even if it was before you (or I) were born.
CC: @lispi314@udongein.xyz @scanner@apricot.social @mjdxp@labyrinth.zone @mavica_again@computerfairi.es
@teajaygrey @lispi314 @scanner @mjdxp @mavica_again Oh don't even get me started on the "online friends aren't real friends" thing, heh. (Or do, that's not literal.)
I take it you're human, and singlet, and not furry, and I have no idea about the statistics of your corner of fedi but maybe not queer? Point being, there ARE people around you that you can a) find and b) relate to.
When you[general]'re literally all of those things at once, like us? If we didn't have the internet, we /would not have friends./
That's not an exaggeration. I'd resigned myself to just being alone forever because I didn't even know there EXISTED other people in the world that were at all like me. I certainly had no words to describe what was missing.
