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by MarkusWandel 51 days ago
The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere.

Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years.

Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that.

Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.

3 comments

How the world has changed, repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax

The phone in your pocket did not necessarily destroy that. What changed more was the disappearance of legible ownership and locality
wuarchive.wustl.edu, ftp.funet.fi!