| 1,000% This. The internet during that era cultivated some incredible heuristics for navigating the internet. During the era (at 14/15) I: - Stuck behind a firewall, I downloaded gigabytes of porn from unsecured FTP servers by Google dorking - Played hours of bootleg Quake3 and SOFII on my old-faithful cracked Windows XP (still remember the key to this day) - Reinstalled XP about 1,000x everytime I downloaded something I shouldn't have - Found hundreds of weird documentaries on The Pirate Bay and Smoking in the Rain from all over the planet - Spent countless hours talking with a bunch of weirdos on IRC - Had an HTML-only website called 'Science Experimenter' - Dual-booted FreeBSD - Played around on my SDF Unix shell - Played Doom and Wolf3D downloaded from Vetusware on Dos 7.1/Win 3.1 - Newsgroups. Oh man, remember bootlegging movies from newsgroups. That early internet was just incredible. From wandering through Fravia's Searchlores, to Geocities (where I first discovered the term 'Computer Engineering'), to the early MP3s you could find of HOPE and Defcon talks), to Andre Lamothe's XGameStation kit, to the Homebuilt CPUs Webring (I fell in love with Magic-1), to the OsDev wiki DexOS, MenuetOS, etc. Today's internet is so convenient. It's like you said, it's 'curated.' It's not a jungle of lost Mayan civilization you can Indiana Jones through. Edit: I realize today's internet is even more rich than the one I describe, but the nostalgia is just too strong. I prefer to live in my simple world. |