[dragonwriter]

> The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.

> The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.

That's a wild contrast to try to draw, since the actual direct experience of the network in the Matrix (and which is the focus of the film) was an immersive virtual reality of exactly the type you are trying to contrast the portrayal in the Matrix with, and the “hacking in to a server with an OpenSSH exploit” occurred as a simulation within that virtual reality.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment.

But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy to navigate (remember Second-Life).

That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.

[ethbr1]

~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years.

So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker wouldn't waste cycles on.

To your general point, it felt like there was a shift around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business" and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of software.

Honestly, I think we all would have been better off if we'd turned the web to something more approachable for common people (especially if it inspired them to be creators).

Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background.

[anthk]

In the 90's even hackers loved some bling-bling. Maybe not with E16, but some WMaker with a nice backdrop and a transparent UXTerm was really nice and much faster than the emerging KDE in late 90's.

Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.

[jasomill]

Yup. Circa 1997, I switched from AfterStep to (then-new) Enlightenment briefly before settling on WindowMaker as a good balance between bling and performance.

My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386 (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.

[sonicanatidae]

I think the change you mentioned (2000) has to do with maturity of the tech, as well as, maturity of the acceptance of this tech, as part of everyday life.

As far as the state of the web today, you can thank commercial entities. Yes, they did/do contribute to the web's existance, but at the same time, they make it much worse.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

"~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years."

and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...

"Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background."

Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the eyesore?

Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the masses.