All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
What the 90's/00's looks like for developers and admins?
Hello all, I'm not form the US or any western countries, and at my country we start getting internet at home ( dial-up ) ~2004
Even before that I was interested on computers and internet, I read tech magazines and watched many documentary talks about it.
I personally think the 90's and early 2000's was the golden era of internet a step forward that never happened before in human history.
And who's were the king and on top of all this, system/servers admins and the developers ( especially web developers ).
I mean it was new technology for most people whom work on that field, I want to know for people who work close to this revolution, how it was on personal level and even on relation with your bosses/mangers that time, even socially how people were looking at you, if any of them knows what's you're doing.
Comments
RTFM
I had a Commodore 64 and 1200 baud modem from about 1985 to 1990. I used to be into the BBS "scene" in those years. It was fun, but I still maintained a life outside of the Commodore. For most of the rest of the 90's I didn't really use computers much at all. Some of my friends had 486's in the early internet days. It seems like the years I spent computer free were the best years of my life. No social media, very few cell phones, people connected in reality. I really lived life then. Since I got a "PC" in about 1999 it's kinda all been downhill.
Just my two cents.
Man at around the same time as yours I were having the time of my life with dial-up. Oh boy i remember Yahoo Chat room and live webcam shit back then in my country.
for me it was the opposite I want to have Computer that time so bad that I spend 5 months of my part time job salary to buy new one ~2002, that time only rich or influence people had new computer , I did the mistake of my live and spent a lot of time gaming on it, instead learning computers skills, because I never had gaming console at all, this something I deeply regret later on my life.
The society I'm around this happened ~2010 as people start buying smart phones and laptops, before that ( at least on my small society ) people were so close together.
I guess that were hard time for un-experience engineers.
You'd think so right?
But no.
Sure only thing missing is the instant gratification received today while Googling something
For me reading the manual were luxury, I studied C.S late 90's, and since my English were terrible, and I only read books on my native language, so I forced to memories commands names that's make no FKn sense on my brain, So I understand why most my colleague give-up much early on this profession.
For me it was the other way, I got a spectrum clone at 14 and started pirating games. In time, I modded the poor machine and was able to access and dump memory at any moment and felt the best in the world
It was 1989 so the speccy was already on the way out, but I could not afford a poor 2nd hand 386 SX20 until 1994, I learnt DOS in a Netware environment in the University's IT lab. I wrote own clone of nc in turbo pascal for basic file manipulation...
I only started making money in IIT much later, cca 2001 as an IT manager for a medium company, but I was actually hired for my Economist credentials and I always had this double perspective that helped a lot.
China, 1998, residential.
Dial 163 to connect to the information superhighway for ¥0.12 per minute.
During the session, you get a public IPv4 address and as much speed as your MODEM can manage.
All internet sites are accessible; there's no firewall.
There are magazines and books about how to use the information superhighway, including URLs of major websites.
China, 2006, college.
Every dorm room has an Ethernet jack capable of 100Mbps speed.
To use, the student requests a static IPv4 address that is associated with their computer's MAC address.
Domestic websites are unlimited access; international websites are limited to 1GB download per month.
It's free, but you get a fine if you exceed international traffic quota.
Firewall starts appearing, with certain specific keywords triggering RST.
IPv6 is installed in 2008, with unlimited access to international websites and no firewall.
There are on-campus seminars about how to build websites.
I read about HTML around 2006 I was FKn super dump that time I considered it useless language and could not get a job from learning it, I learned that ppl making money from designing websites ~2010 but until I learn it with PHP it was too late as the market already established only couple known companies controlling it, that was the biggest opportunity I missed on my life.
In what country only now home internet becoming commodity?
I learned HTML back in the Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire days. Took a summer school course to learn Microsoft Frontpage 2000. Animated gifs, midi files and iframes were in no short supply.
I used to go to Internet cafe and still remember the day on which Google started its service and the net cafe owner asked me to use it instead of Yahoo search. I liked the logo (mostly gif) and wondered how to create a similar one for my hobby site.
The first hobby site was nagmafansonline.4t.c0m
(Nagma is an actress in India. I was a Nagma fan)
I bought my first domain in 2003.
And the site is in web archive (Not related to hosting). The first capture was on 08 July 2003.
Here is the link
My first host was spaceforhost(dot)com and I paid via Post office Money order.
I was still at uni at the late 00s, internet access and computers were also rare in my country due to our purchasing power (about two months pay to get a decent PC, and a week pay for a month of 1 Mbps ADSL). I still remember during our campus orientation, most of the freshmen barely ever touched a browser, let alone knowing how to search for stuff.
When Microsoft released the integrated VS Express offline installer with all products and a limited MSDN in one CD, it's like a blessing. Downloading the CD alone take overnight in an internet cafe, but at least I can bring it to my PC that barely got online in its entire lifetime to install everything and get contextual help with examples (unlike, say, Javadoc that is so terse it border on useless if you're a complete beginner), all without any internet access. I was so pissed off when I get the Ubuntu installer and finding out it can't play any MP3 files I have unless I can get it online, which was pretty much impossible. Due to that, even though now most of my VMs are either on Debian or Ubuntu, I will always have a soft spot for Mint.
Everything was super painful, unless you know someone that's really experienced, it's not unusual to get stuck at something that nowadays you could solve in a few minutes, or maybe even instantly if your IDE's AI recognize what you're trying to do and correct your mistake.
My first contact with computers was a Dragon 32 or a TRS-80, cant remember exactly which one but I instantly knew that this was something with enormous potential. I soon started to buy broken computers and fixing them, working my way trough a whole bunch of Commodores, Amigas and 286's.
I ran a pretty big BBS for several years so when dialup became I thing I was basically already an ISP so I just went public with it and started my first company. Got my hands on some Sun SPARCStation's, later upgraded to Netra and Ultra's, and running enterprise hardware gave us an edge and the company was extremely successful.
At that time most people had no idea what was happening. Internet was something weird that only nerds used, and most people still thought of it as just a fad, something that will soon disappear again. I cant even remember how many times I tried to explain to someone what I was doing and they understood nothing and showed no interest at all.
It was not a glorious life in any way. Even later during the ".com bubble" the only ones that made money or were made famous were the morons with completely idiotic ideas. The ones with common sense that tried to say "this is bullshit" were laughed at.
I've made a lot of money in IT, in everything from hosting to webdesign, but it was never glorious. The "golden era" was actually accomplished by hard working nerds with minimum wage that built a working infrastructure, not the airhead webdesigners that burned billions during the .com bubble.
C’mon rcy, you know that .com would benefited you if only you would dare to risk. Unfortunately we both cowardly caved in and millions not raked… If only I took those 57 btc in time, when offered as a joke. If only
Similar, in 2000, DHTML was the hype there.
I had 300 eth but lost the wallet. It was more than that but not remembering how much. I was running folding at home in 2009 on company computers and some employee said he wants to mine bitcoin instead. In time he gathered more than 300 and I thought I was smart and started with ethereum at home. In the end he sold his stash for pennies and I lost mine completely, but I would have sold for cheap too.
Me too! At the time i was sharing 4K line with 10 people to cut the 100 usd monopoly costs and Altavista used to take 10 minutes to load, so Google was a breeze...
I remember the teacher not being amused when my project site was populated with little Southpark GIFs and midi clips of Cartman. As I recall, it was a mixture of South Park, BMX stuff and WWF (now WWE) wrestling related content... Ha!
CometCursor, now that takes me back too.
I did run a fairly popular BMX forum in the early 00's as a teenager. That was fun. I published a couple crappy YABB forum software "mods" and a theme or two as well. CGI/Perl was my first introduction to something other than HTML.
And here I am, haven't really advanced my capabilities too much. IncogNET is still running a very basic CMS I wrote probably a decade or more ago. Only somewhat modernized recently. It works, haha.
My project was a matchmaking site for pets. Matrimoniale was for people at the time, sso mine was Animoniale for cats and dogs, races and prizes, with animated GIFs and the like. It wasn't much even as it had a kind of text database, but everyone was amused by my parody.
I forgot everything before 2004. My world changed.
I feel like adults in the 80s - 00s had the best chance of starting something from nothing. If you are an intuitive person I think you had a lot of potential.
Nowadays you have a lot more to think about.. like where to start, I can imagine people these days thinking "where the fuck do I start" then giving up.
Shit, imagine when AI is designing and building everything for us, we may find ourselves in a situation where society has reset and we have no clue how to rebuild it all cos some solar storm killed all our electronics and everyone relies on commands.
It's kinda weird to think that it is completely possible and we are currently in the last phase of retained human intelligence or something.
Now, at this time, there is plenty of idiots. And I mean it. There is a fck ton of just stupid people. So, you still have your chance to earn decent money by catering to that audience. Foot, ears, hair, hands and butt fetishes. All possible type of diets including sun, dirt and just plain water diet. Write a e-book about xyz, you will hit some niche and profit.
Today everything goes faster than in 80-00’s. For some it is good, for some it is bad, but you have more tools to live better than before. And a tad longer.
I do not completely agree. Yes, money was flying around like crazy in IT back then, but it was truly a "easy come easy go" thing, a lot of people got bankrupted for life. I have friends that still have debt from crashing in the early 00s.
Today we have things like Onlyfans and every kind of social media making stupid people insanely rich. Even if the odds of making it big are small, I think they are way better today then ever before.
It was a happy time when software did not require at least 2 GB of RAM to run a simple DNS service. I remember the time when shared hosting with DirectAdmin ran on Celeron CPUs. If anyone tells me that a simple HTML site runs smoother on AMD Ryzen now, I will cry.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010404055255/http://stansautoexports.com/
This was my first foray into web design. Some accountant guy actually paid me $2000 CAD for this! Domain and hosting was with Tucows. I didn't really know what I was doing at the time, still learning the webs. Made it with Front Page Express and Publisher. The name "Dostovel" was from the N64 007 Golden Eye video game. It's actually DD44 Dostovei (gun), but I had always misread it as Dostovel.
My first PC was a desktop spare from my dad - a Pentium with 266 MHz, some 32MB of RAM and a GPU that actually did only 2.5D, not even 3D (it was from 1994).
Internet in Portugal was very expensive, with 56k modems being generally widespread in 1995 through 1998, and the top tier RDIS lines - capable of a whopping 128 Kbps - being around "10 contos" - 50 euros on the 2002 conversion, possibly around 100 euros adjusted for today. The minimum wage was roughly 250-300 euros, so you get the idea.
Only around 1998/1999 did the wideband start to arrive to Portugal, through TVCabo or, if you were lucky enough, through Cabovisão (currently NOWO and acquired by Digi Portugal), which had better TV quality, good variety and was substantially less expensive, some 40% less. At that time, first, a whopping 640 Kbps; then, 1 Mbps, 2 Mbps and so on.
My first contact with the Internet was only in 2000/2001, but by then I already had a deep Windows knowledge on the 9x and basically know how to do anything. Learned by myself, as always, had nearly zero guidance there, it was all my curiosity and some technology magazines (notably PC Guia and Guia da Internet!). Very fun times, may I say, where I bricked my 9x installs time and again, and learned several things.
On Linux, my first contact wasn't until 2004/2005, where I installed Caixa Mágica (based on Mandrake/Mandriva) and SUSE, and from the get-go I loved the concept of Linux. Gave me quite some headaches and wasn't as linear as I thought, but otherwise learned much (and read a whole lot!) throughout the years until getting where I am today, where it's very easy for me to work on Linux.
The late 90s were a golden time, but the 2000s somewhat corrupted that concept to an extent. However, it was the time when anything was really possible and we still lived somewhat outside of the Internet and had contacts of our own. The mobile phones, the SMS texts, the social networks and lastly the smartphones and tablets... I think that all of this made us get too deep on the Internet. Personally, I think that a world without social networks would be much much better, or if those were regulated and severely limited/hampered. Even on mobile phones, it's a little questionable the extent to which things have come, but... I guess we have to live with that.
One thing is for sure: the 90s were the last analog era. For better or for worse. But I believe that'll be back soon. We can't really stray too far from what we need as humans, despite what anyone attempts to sell us. In time, we'll get there.