I just turned 34 so a few years older than you but I get what you are saying. I know it wasn't that long ago but I miss the days of getting home from school and chatting with friends on Yahoo! Messenger and then MSN (British so AIM was not a big thing for me). Before Yahoo! Messenger was Yahoo! Chat and ICQ. One of the strongest memories I have from when I was 16 was when my parents told me they were separating. The first person I spoke to was a random guy on ICQ I had made friends with somehow. From what I remember he was maybe 10 years older than I and he gave me a lot of great advice. I think about him, b@dac1d I think was how he spelt his name, from time to time. Although I don't even know what country he was from he was a good 'friend'.
Part of what I miss is the wonder that was the internet. Everything that happened was happening for the first time. Real time chat, online gaming, etc. as well as learning the fundamentals of many things such as programming and computer science. Now when I sit down to learn a new language it doesn't feel like it did when I first learn VB, C, Java 2, Perl, etc.
The last "new" thing that I remember being truly excited for was when virtualisation became something you could do on consumer hardware (VMware, Virual PC) in the early/mid-00s. Now I see new things like VR but I don't really get so excited for it.
Hardware is amazing now (I am writing this on a laptop with a six-core/twelve-thread i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a GPU with 4GB RAM to itself and 2TB of solid state storage) but it is just better hardware, it doesn't have that exciting new factor to it.
I remember feeling so damn excited when I upgraded my old desktop to 768MB RAM. Everytime I booted it up and saw the RAM check in POST scroll up to 768 I got giddy with excitement. Almost a little adrenaline rush. Now not so much. I guess I really am just getting old!
I regularly go on Slack and Discord servers (and still some IRC) but they feel different to me. I think it is the 1000+ members whereas back in the 90s/early-00s you had maybe 100-150 members in a channel and you would know most of them to some degree. Same with USENET in that you would often have conversations with the same people, it didn't matter how many people read that newsgroup it was only those that were active and that was usually a lot smaller in number. Often a couple of dozen in the newsgroups I frequented.
OP if you fancy a chat pop along to cpplang.slack.com and join us in #off-topic, doesn't matter if you're not a C++ programmer. We welcome mostly anyone in that channel and they are a nice bunch.
Part of what I miss is the wonder that was the internet. Everything that happened was happening for the first time. Real time chat, online gaming, etc. as well as learning the fundamentals of many things such as programming and computer science. Now when I sit down to learn a new language it doesn't feel like it did when I first learn VB, C, Java 2, Perl, etc.
The last "new" thing that I remember being truly excited for was when virtualisation became something you could do on consumer hardware (VMware, Virual PC) in the early/mid-00s. Now I see new things like VR but I don't really get so excited for it.
Hardware is amazing now (I am writing this on a laptop with a six-core/twelve-thread i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a GPU with 4GB RAM to itself and 2TB of solid state storage) but it is just better hardware, it doesn't have that exciting new factor to it.
I remember feeling so damn excited when I upgraded my old desktop to 768MB RAM. Everytime I booted it up and saw the RAM check in POST scroll up to 768 I got giddy with excitement. Almost a little adrenaline rush. Now not so much. I guess I really am just getting old!
I regularly go on Slack and Discord servers (and still some IRC) but they feel different to me. I think it is the 1000+ members whereas back in the 90s/early-00s you had maybe 100-150 members in a channel and you would know most of them to some degree. Same with USENET in that you would often have conversations with the same people, it didn't matter how many people read that newsgroup it was only those that were active and that was usually a lot smaller in number. Often a couple of dozen in the newsgroups I frequented.
OP if you fancy a chat pop along to cpplang.slack.com and join us in #off-topic, doesn't matter if you're not a C++ programmer. We welcome mostly anyone in that channel and they are a nice bunch.