I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod files and .xm files from aminet and learning to write tracker music in Fast Tracker 2, downloading and playing all sorts of cool Doom wads, installing DJGPP and pouring over the source code for Allegro and picking up more game programming chops, and getting incredibly caught up in following the Doom community and .plan files for the release of Quake.
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
It's a different thing nonetheless. I don't think that the thing that makes the modern web bad is that the "unwashed masses" are using it (as several commenters here assert), it's the commercialization.
The web is no longer a place for people to be able to interact freely with each other. It's a place to monetize or be monetized. That means that a lot of the value of the web is gone, because it's value that can't be monetized without destroying it.
The "unwashed masses" (your words) are only here because companies that want to advertise to them made their systems just good enough to draw them in but just bad enough they exploit the worse instincts in people to make more advertising money.
If the web was not commercial then it wouldn't be mainstream. While they are different they are fundamentally linked.
> Libraries and highways are very mainstream and are not commercial.
I would argue that the highways are actually a counter-example of what you are saying. They exist to connect workers to businesses, businesses to other businesses, and businesses to consumers. While there is certainly an amount of traffic on the highway that is not doing those three things, we have a name for the first one in any populated area - rush hour. To say that the highway system was not intended to facilitate commerce is just historically inaccurate.
The difference between the highway system and the Internet is that the creation of the Internet was not intended to facilitate commerce - it in fact took several years (1991-1995 as best I can tell) for it to officially be allowed as the neolibs in government did not want to keep funding the network. That choice is why we are where we are with the Internet - the good and the bad.
Nice response. It's true that highways carry both commercial and non-commercial traffic, and that trucks and commercial vehicles clog up highways and make it worse for non-commercial traffic. There is also a difference between the internet (communication infrastructure) and the web (stuff that uses it), which I was wary of, so the analogy isn't perfect in OP's context.
But the vision of an information "superhighway" should be something that is better than regular highways. The good news is that network bandwidth is much easier to add than highway lanes, and is increasing at a much faster rate than human bandwidth.
I'm using the web as a synecdoche for the Internet as a whole because before the Web there wasn't much of a reason for Joe and Jane Q Public to use the Internet.
The Internet was intentionally commercialized and privatized as a third step in its development, from DARPA project, to education/research network, to what we have today.
Mainstreaming is a side effect of its broadening scope; as college students graduated and scholars took their work home with them, the NSFnet backbone was ceded to Sprintlink, and OS/hardware developers started working on consumer-grade interfaces.
I miss the Internet of the 90s because every page I visit today has a pop-up asking me if I want to accept cookies. It makes browsing the open web a jarring experience.
Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.
Well, it became mainstream by the late 1990s (IIRC the pets.com superbowl ad was 1999). But in 1992 or so it was still a bunch of Gopher sites (this new fangled "World Wide Web" will never displace this technology...) and MUDs being used by college students and hobbyists.
In 1993, UNC Charlotte had one computer in its library with a big sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. It would be a few years yet before home computers became commonplace in that region, and late ‘90’s before everyone was more likely than not to have a computer at home, and to have some sort of dial-up internet. I was purchasing domains in 1997-1998 for $3/ea, I believe (I wish I could have known then what I know now…). I sold my first website design job in ‘96, which would probably coincide with when many businesses around Charlotte were establishing websites for the first time.
Fun to think about.
In this context, “mainstream” may just be another way to describe Web 2.0.
I think this is genuinely true. The internet today appeals to the lowest common denominator, in the same way that blockbuster movies often do. It is less appealing because it is less specific to our tastes.
Similar story here, with similarly disastrous impacts on my GPA. There was something magical about that time - technology was moving so rapidly and access to information was exploding. It was all so very early that it seemed like anything was possible for an aspiring computer nerd with a good computer and a fast internet connection.
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
Same here, the Internet, game modding, early LAN->Internet bridges for multiplayer gaming, IRC and all that probably reduced my GPA by about -1.0 and that caused me to miss out on the "premium" tech employers early in my career, ultimately set me back decades. Thank you, rec.games.computer.quake.* hierarchy and Quake-C mailing lists.
the AI image generation and 3D printing community had a similar kind of feel from 2021-2023, both are slowing down now though and becoming more mainstream everyday and needing less tinkering everyday. Which is great but disapointing at the same time.
It doesn't feel like the same energy to me. Image generation was always "ok, maybe we release this for free or cheap now to see how people feel about it but sooner or later we're going to charge $$$" and 3d printing... I don't know, I think those guys are still doing their own thing. The barrier to get in is lower but there's still Luke warm interest to do so.
Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).