[jl6]

To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal.

I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.

[toast0]

I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either.

But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.

I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.

I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...

[pjc50]

Really tricky. The big invisible (to many people) piece of progress is equalities; homophobia was much more overt back then. But I still think the best time for us in the UK was the 1997-2001 period. "Cool Brittania" to Iraq War.

1990 probably a bit too early. Right at the end of the Cold War. Deindustrialization still a big, ugly scar across many cities. The Troubles still ongoing; few residents of Northern Ireland would set the time machine back before 1998, I think.

[atherton94027]

What would they be giving up? DoorDash?

By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.

[doubled112]

I think you can go back further

I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not.

I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.

[owisd]

> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”

[immibis]

It's hard to commit to saying yes but it's also hard to commit to saying no.