Yea you had to be watched by a monkey or at least some form of intelligent rodent at all times.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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retroNET - Vintage Culture/Websites/Software
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Websites, software, games, fads, memes, or any general happenings that used to occur or had originated on computers 20+ years ago.
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We had forums with specialists then. Now we have "social media" with trolls and imbeciles.
What I miss most is just how much information was available and crammed on the main page without a need to scroll or click. These days it's all nonsense white space and hamburger menus.
Way back in the early '90s I was using what passed for the internet. Email, Usenet, ftp sites and all text websites before they started embedding graphics. Browsers were very odd back then.
My ISP got all excited about the WWW and was incessantly emailing us encouraging this pretty arcane process that you would have to do in order to get Winsock on your computer and install Mosaic and all. When I looked into what it actually was, I was just confused and put off by it. I have usenet and ftp. What the fuck are you trying to sell me on? Fonts and graphics? On the internet? This looks stupid, I don't want it.
I eventually had a job where there was a computer in my office that could do WWW. Literally all I can remember about it was the Rome lab snowball cam where you could look at a real-time image of their office and try to hit people with solid white circles ("snowballs") that would get dynamically added to the image. I still was not impressed. In hindsight, I think I was onto something.
I think 1998 was just better all around
I wrote up a whole little historical essay about how in Woodstock '99, when some assholes decided to run a music festival that was an exploitative cash-grab that ultimately was sloppily put together, disappointing, and endangered the safety of the participants, all the kids recognized what the game was, and tore the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground. They threw batteries at the MTV "VJ"s, they smashed up the cash machines and vendor tents and took back their money, and then they lit a match.
So yeah it was a different time. Right around that time was the end of the vigor generation and their replacement by the tech job generation (which then birthed the Doordasher no health insurance generation because they weren't vigorous or well-organized enough to fight back real effectively.)
https://www.netflix.com/title/81280924
Worth a watch.
This was exactly what I watched that educated me about it, it is fascinating. The whole documentary is a masterclass in telling the story by just laying out what happened, not really editorializing but just letting the bad guys hang themselves by explaining their take on it and then juxtaposed against some other events and information.
Ah, just < table > layout, not this < div > css nonsense. Having rounded corners as images on a table, perfection.
No way! Java applets are the future.
I remember all of this stuff.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to die of old age.
It's a little bit of a nitpick, but "Mozilla" didn't exactly rise from the ashes of Netscape. They tried to open source Netscape, but among other issues the code was horrible, and when they started discussing getting serious about open sourcing it, someone had some kind of bright idea of making this all-encompassing UI framework based on XML, and piping every app through this horrible omni-UI layer because it was going to be the future, with a perfect utopian web browser called Mozilla as the central crown in the kingdom's highest tower, and it was always a janky and glacially slow pile of ass that, year after year, continued just barely working but not really. Linux users of the day generally had some experiences with it and then switched to one of the even-less-complete options available like Galeon or Konqueror, which brought their own maturity issues to the table, but at least they weren't Mozilla.
Eventually, after investing years of effort and millions of dollars into this pile, the Mozilla foundation eventually decided with great fanfare to invent the idea of just making a web browser. They called it ~~Phoenix~~ ~~Firebird~~ Firefox (~~Iceweasel~~), and it used normal UI technologies and came alongside some other separated normal-UI apps like Thunderbird. And if you ask them about Mozilla itself, they react like Germans when you ask them where their granddad was during the war years.
I bet in 1998 the websites opened the pictures when you clicked the link near the thumbnail (even if one row of pixels at a time). I don't know wtf is wrong with lemmy.
You should use sync for Lemmy
Is it getting updates regularly again? I moved to voyager due to lack of updates leaving things broken.
I haven't had any problems at all