[p3rls]

If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.

[gonzobonzo]

Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling around with Wordpress most of the time.

It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).

[p3rls]

Throwing up a page on geocities and editing the HTML was not only easy but it was fun, and you could immediately get into a dopamine-feedback loop that sees you actually improving your basic web development skills. The game-designers paradigm of "easy to learn, hard to master" rings out here.

Back then even throwing up a colored background and marquee text was sorta thrilling. I remember people put so much effort even to basic shit like their AOL profiles back in 1999 and that sorta bled into the personal website scene. But really for me I think it was tools like html and geocities that enabled this.

But where is that today? Python beginner webdev stuff? Can you really get into that feedback loop by messing around with flask and elixir? I guess it must work for some people but I look out at the web today and most of what I see is SEO garbage. Definitely not 100 flowers blooming, but one ugly google-kudzu blanketing the entire thing.

[skeeter2020]

>> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.

[rambambram]

> Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

This kickstarted webdev for me too. I remember the moment exactly.

[krapp]

> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.

[evanjrowley]

Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome.

Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.

[sirl1on]

Nitpick: I think known file extensions where hidden in Explorer since at least Windows 95

https://www.brainbell.com/tutors/A+/Hardware/Managing_Files_...

[sylens]

The inflection point was iOS

[krapp]

It didn't take deep technical skill and knowledge to build a Geocities website in the 1990s though, and most people who did were minimally computer literate. I feel like you're conflating issues here.

[erikerikson]

As opposed to having Hacker News accounts ;P

[bolognafairy]

because they don’t use neovim