The linked video shows this phenomenon full effect. The internet in the video is slow, clunky, and ugly. How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background? The difference between the web of then and now is staggering. But as someone who grew up through the early 90s watching the internet expand, it sure didn't feel like things were changing fast. It happened gradually - companies starting coming online slowly (and often with a very limited presence): nytimes, barnes+noble, moviefone. Then the internet started getting organized better, first with Yahoo's directories, then with search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos. Then, Google came along, gradually improving their algorithm to the point where we can now access almost any piece of the world's information in seconds. In retrospect, there was so much going on during that time period, but living through it didn't feel that way.
More than anything else, I think this is a testament that having a real impact on technology in the long-term is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have a vision, and incrementally improve on it constantly, even if it feels like you're not accomplishing much in the short term.
I still recall going from a single core AMD to an Intel q6600 quad core CPU and thinking how amazing it was that I did not have to worry about my entire CPU locking up on one bad app going bonkers and eating 100% of the CPU. It became possible to have an app crash and max out a core and not even notice it immediately. Even when OSs and apps did not do mult-core processing overly well, I still manually set the affinity to most heavy apps so they were isolated to their own cores.
I also found another book called "Creating Killer Websites" by David Siegel. (http://www.killersites.com/killerSites/core.html) It's amazing just how different everything was.
I love the modern Internet, but I do wish the web had started with HTML & CSS, and everything else was kludged onto somewhere else.
This perfectly describes the modern. JS-overloaded "subtle shading" design of modern web apps...
The grey backgrounds were really weird, in retrospect. But they were cool and different! Oh, and that's why grey on grey is back-- fads coming and going to look cool and different.
Check out around 5:00 when they start describing the first live band to stream a concert online--a group of geeks from Xerox PARC in Palo Alto! And one of them, in the interview, says "If 100 bands tried to do [live streaming] at the same time, disaster would ensue. It may not be possible to do what we did in another couple years."
But perhaps my favorite part was right at the beginning, when they're talking about "electronic mail." John Markoff from the NY Times casually shows his email inbox..."Here's a message I got from Steve Jobs, for example." (!)
Markoff admits even then that email was hard to keep up with: "When you're in my position, you get hundreds or even thousands of messages each day..." And he shows off his fancy new Eudora "filters" that he's using to make his inbox usable.
Great piece of history...and it really shows how far we've come in under 20 years. I doubt any one of them would have predicted that the #1 Billboard hit in 2013 would come from a Korean band that no one had heard of...until they put a music video online that got over 1.4 billion views. Breathtaking, and it makes me excited for the next 20 years and whatever we're going to come up with next.
If your inbox is jammed with work email, then you have a bad job. If your personal email is jammed, then you need to click 'Unsubscribe' more. Or you're a public figure, in which case they always have gotten mail, postal or electronic. The internet just let a lot more people become public figures, so be careful what you wish for.
This episode on UNIX from 1985 (with a bearded Bill Joy) is great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7P16mYDIJw
On another note I somewhat wish we could go back to a (slightly) less interactive web. Everywhere you go you are overwhelmed with social media plugins and calls to various actions (WE WANT YOUR ANSWERS! [taken from mentalfloss]).
you want to see some really old-looking pages and feel some nostalgia? Just go to DMOZ - http://www.dmoz.org/ - and click through the categories. They have hundreds of pages that felt right out of 90s. (If they work at all.)
http://www.netline.be/presse/cybertaire/news/ccafe.htm#icon
The more things things change...
2013: "very concerned... In about 6 years."
1995: "...and this is usenet which is a collection of computer 'conferences'"
2013: "what? When I first logged on at Purdue, 1993, I thought of usenet as a public email inbox. Oh and hey 1995! Sell SUNW and buy AAPL.
Nowadays, a 5 year old site can still look and feel like it was made today. Back then, a 5 month old site was already outdated.
I actually had dealings with SoftQuad (the last interview) back then.
It's amazing how things change and how we just accept new stuff and take it for granted!
