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You’re shockingly close to the plot of The Matrix.
Me in 1999: Really? This is the peak of human civilization? Everything sucks though.
Me now: Maybe they were onto something
“I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.” - ChatGPT
- Altman and Amodei
More like The Village by M Knight Shamalambalan.
I would sign up?
Whoa, Black Betty, Shyamalan
Also, tangentially, the plot of project zomboid. Basically the zombie apocalypse happens in the late 90s so the survivors are stuck there forever
OK, but we demand IRC instead of AOL-IM.
It’s period appropriate, should be fine
I want Pidgin or Trillian so I can talk to my friends on both MSN and Yahoo.
Also shoutouts to the brief period where everything was xmpp and Gmail could talk to Facebook and self-hosted.
Though if your friend is over and wants to check their msn, DO NOT LET THEM LOG IN TO YOUR TRILLIAN. It will merge your friends lists because Trillian followed a “one person many accounts” model, not a “many people each with many accounts” one.
oh fun. that is an oversight.
I think the problem is that all the other chat services that they used to connect to closed off their connection protocols. Can’t serve a bunch of shitty advetisements if users aren’t using your website or app.
Sure, and it’s nice, but the network effect is a removed
Just one open source free platform would be fine. IRC with modern protocols for pics and video that can be viewed in the chat app of your choosing. Keep it simple, or add backgrounds. Mini chat boxes, or transparancy. Basic low resource use, or heavy, you decide, same open cross app platform.
uh oh
No, not ICQ
ICQ was pretty good. You could message offline people, which AOL/aim didn’t support. Of course, this lead to a whole experience of waiting for your friend/crush to log on, but then not messaging them immediately… but then they log off and the opportunity passed.
It takes me a minute to remember my cell number, but I can rattle off my IQC number in a second. My ICQ fridge magnet was kept for decades through multiple moves
I remember i downloaded ICQ for my counter strike clan. That was the first i had ever heard of it, but i guess it had hit international popularity already . When I realized you just got a number, i was baffled that i couldnt search by name. Didnt take me long to memorize that number and make many online friends
Random chat made me some amazing friends that I kept in touch with for decades. Those friendships lasted longer than IQC did. Sadly, the Internet is a different place now.
Oh gosh I can still remember mine!
23496*** censored just in case.
sad ship horn noises
I loved ICQ! I’m sure some people thought it was a horrible idea to see people type in real time but to me it was peak messenging.
I loved ICQ too at the time, but I’m not giving up End-To-End encrypted messaging for copyright stealing ICQ.
“You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it.”
But I’m totally okay to see ICQ brought back as a “skin” for the matrix-protocol. Something that looks, sounds and works like ICQ, but is based on modern communications technology.
I still know my ICQ number by heart, and a close friends too, who is lower than mine by about 50k. 140… and mine was 201…
Haven’t used em in about 25 years.
But then I also still know my childhood phone number.
Give me back the golden era of Usenet!
Both. Pagers with LCD or eink only. No LED screens.
I think I have my Advisor Gold around here somewhere
OLED. Can still use modern advances in practical tech. Can still have open source, modern kernel linux, modern ram and low power 3nm chips. Just keep all the tech simple and clean of marketing and addiction. All the good, less of the bad.
Not sure that will work, ubiquitous video is still possible.
Yahoo Messenger
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And Domino’s instead of Pizza Hut
How about a non-chain? Local pizza places still thrived in the 90s. That was one of the best parts of the 90s. Wal*Mart was slowly killing off mom-and-pop shops, but it hadn’t finished yet, so there was a lot of variety and still a lot of craftsmanship in general.
Let’s do both, gotta have options. and a Taco Bell
Dominos is the best national chain now, in the 90s not so much. But Pizza Hut has always been too oily.
IRC is still around and kicking. My friends and I use it all the time.
Yahoo or MSN.
Maybe that’s why I still use IRC. I was doing this subconsciously all along.
Can we keep the “no smoking inside commercial establishments” policy at least? Otherwise I’m down.
Also can we keep the progress (what little there has been) we made for LGBTQ folks?
I would like to add one exception to this: explicitly for smoking establishments. It’d be nice to have a weed’n’feed is all.
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This is how you accidentally start a Gen-X commune.
Take me back to the time when I would finish before the bottom half of jenna jameson even manages to load
Well, with dial-up that could be 10 minutes.
You’d still beat me by 50 minutes, though.
Data over LoRa is like 200bps :)
we don’t draw things in real time tho, we wait for them to finish
The nightmare of the 90s is alive in Ft Wayne
just the nightmare is alive in Gary. ain’t had power in weeks from what i heard. and it’s dog days. there’s no way the delays in repairs ain’t intentional.
Honestly, the 90s was a shit time for many LGBTQ people and often PoCs as well. Can we have (at least) todays levels of wokeness? Oh and today levels of healthcare… and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and…
We don’t need to recreate every aspect.
Treat it like a Ren Faire.
Wear the No Fear shirts and carry a Walkman, but do it for fun.
Sit back, watch some Reading Rainbow or Erie Indiana.
Maybe sing the Song that Never Ends.
It’s all play acting, but it’s nice. Especially if we focus on the nice parts of the 90s, the stuff that led to the wokeness of today.
I’m down for that
Ya, and maybe we can have “Blockbuster’s” and it’ll be a co-op clone of the og.
I’m down for anything co-op
Is a co-op clone just a community library with extra steps?
Libraries are state run, unbranded, and mostly lend, Blonkboster’s would be a company, just much less shitty.
“Community” library. Like those stations where people store books to share with their neighbors for free.
Blonkboster’s is legally distinct from Blockbuster’s and it smells the same, but i say you can still taste the hog anus when you get blasted by the air freshener
Yeah I really don’t want to have to lie to my doctor and say I’m into men to get my estrogen
Oh and today levels of healthcare… and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and…
i got better healthcare in the 90s dude. but i needed less back then, so i got whatever i asked for.
I hope it doesn’t include 90’s racism, homophobia and transphobia. It was way worse than it is today.
Or '90s crime.
But will it have LGBT Rights?
We’ll make it a gay blockbuster!
I feel like we can grandfather that into the 90s, you’ve watched nightmare on elm street I’m assuming,
The 90s did a terrible job of that…
But I feel like we could import some of the modern improvements, and improve on them even more. Like #metoo, lgbtq rights, and generally acknowledging and attempting to reduce/solve subconscious and systemic bigotry (racism, sexism etc)
The last time I was in a discussion about the 90’s it was a group of people agreeing that they needed to go back to the 90’s because it was the best time, that it truly was the peak of human civilization… and I got downvoted for pointing out how homophobic the era was. I’m glad to see there’s a different outcome this time.
If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.
Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.
How did they manage a 2 G website‽ Amazing!
Please elaborate on your comment. What do you mean by “managed a 2G website”? The technology we advocate for, whose proper name is GSM but which is more commonly referred to as 2G because it is a “second generation” cellular tech, is a voice call technology that has nothing to do with websites or Internet.
Or are you asking how we put up a website for our non-profit company? If that is the question, then I don’t see what is so mysterious: our website is currently just one HTML page, simple enough to be hand-coded in vi, and that method is indeed how I made it…
Or are you asking how we managed to create and run the actual company behind the website? Now here the answer is extreme devotion and dedication, my friend! I gave decades of my life to GSM technology, in my previous project going back to 2011 I sought to design and build my own GSM phone handset, hence I have just the right combination of qualifications and dedication to pursue my new/current idea of building a replacement network for the one that was wrongfully shut down. Just earlier this month the evil overlords of T-Mobile USA shut down their nationwide GSM/2G network; while everyone in r/vintagemobilephones on Reddit only cried and lamented, I gritted my teeth and kept working.
Really, you have the opportunity to recreate the past and I’m stuck with AIM? I’ll stick to XMPP and IRC thanks.
IRC is the shit. I remember wasting so many hours as a teenager just shooting the shit with random people.
My channels were niche ones with the same regular people. A safe place to hang out and talk about anything. It was my introvert version of going to the mall.
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Our parents playing with fire
Or at least ICQ!
We should also have a couple of BBSs that run multiple MUDs.
I can’t wait to play LORD and Usurper again.
So um is this just millennial retirement? Boomers are getting their senior communities we need our own communities
I’m gonna run d&d 10 hours a day when I retire
Oh heck ya
Did you know there is a generation between boomers and millennials?
I feel both entirely seen and unseen at the same time.
That’s basically the premise of The Matrix.
IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
The word “was” is doing a lot of work here. Those things all still exist, and I currently use all of them :)
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second “Era of Good Feelings”.
There’s a reason Agent Smith said the 90s was the peak of humanity. He should know.
The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course
I was going to say, “only if your idea of humanity was very narrow”.
For certain groups of people in the west it was great. But, for the vast majority of the world, it was much worse. We don’t realize how close most of the world was to starvation as just a daily threat back then.
At the very least, the West in the 90s had been more welcoming of migrants and refugees fleeing chaos and economic decline, such was the case with Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the time. The more prosperous nations had been willing to share the safety and prosperity to people outside. But now though? I can’t say the same about the richer countries being more welcoming than before.
Part of the reason for that is that the rest of the world was so incredibly poor that only a handful of refugees could make it to the US. There was simply a lot less migration and asylum-seeking back then. It wasn’t because people were better off. It’s really because they were worse off.
The rest of the world is now richer, and most of the world can afford access to a cell phone. That means they know about the US and how much better it is there, and can often find a way to try to slip through the border to get refugee status.
Newsgroups are just a good technology. Decentralized, moderated as much as the forum decides it needs. Not monetized in any way.
websites you could only discover via a webring
It’s really fucking sad that Pizza hut is seen and remembered in any positive way in the US, it really shows how fucking bad you have it.
A pizze hut opened in my city here in Sweden about two decades ago and it immediately became “ooh, this american thing everyone has heard of through movies is so bad that everyone has to go to it just to experience the unimaginable shit quality and taste.”
Even the cheapest street corner pizzerias we have are in a whole other universe comparably.The key there is that it is remembered in a positive way, not that people thing of it positively now. Pizza Hut used to be it’s own thing, you would get deep dish personal pizza that came out on the cast iron pan they cooked it in. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it was good and different. Now, it’s just shitty generic pizza and i don’t know why anyone would go there, I don’t think I’ve been there for at least 20 years now. It also used to be more like a restaurant, not a fast food joint.
i think it was mostly the mood lighting and the cups, and they ripped families in with the scholastic reading coupons.
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20 years ago was 2006. As I understand it was still okay in 1996 though when I was negative three years old. Also the one near me is actually pretty okay, greasy slop but hey sometimes thats all you want.
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Wouldn’t know. As I said I was born in 99.
“Where were you on 9/11” Fuck if I care I wasn’t sapient yet.
'80s Pizza Hut is entirely different to modern (ie post 2000) Pizza Hut. They may not have been quite as good as the best pizzarias, but they were actually good. '90s is where the decline started, but they weren’t “unimaginable shit” until the turn of the century.
Pizza Hut was never good but it was one of the conglomerations that led to a fairly universal experience. Everywhere had and has a Pizza Hut. It wasn’t limited to the northeast people that genuinely have access to good pizza. It was also generally a childhood experience, where one cared more about the other parts of the whole thing rather than the quality. 90s Pizza Hut was known for “book it”, a program that joined with schools. If you read a book you’d get a star, 5 stars meant a free small pizza. In a world not over saturated by gamification of every single thing it was pretty meaningful
The Blockbuster glazing going on these days is more egregious in my opinion.
I loved renting movies in general, but no one talking about how great it was was old enough to be an account holder with them.
Forgetting about the Blockbuster censorship. Being able to rent video games was pretty awesome, though.
