Ask Lemmy

Since I was quite young at the millennium, but old enough to totally remember it, they'll come a day (hopefully) when I'm one of the few very old people in the world who "remembers the 20th century". Like how there were a small number of people kicking around in the 1980s who could remember the 1800's..

I was there for the beginning of the internet …

Al Gore was instrumental in passing legislation that set the foundation for commercialized internet … and all us old-timers hated it.

Nope, I was there as serial cables and token ring coalesced toward Ethernet, various telemetry and others built toward a common internet, individual well-known servers gave way to a vast directory of dozens.

Much later on, there was this minor invention of Tim Berners-Lee that brought everything together, and I was one of the coders for what may have been the first 401k management web site

I was there for the shot heard 'round the world. The day a hero died and it's all been wrong ever since.

I was at the Cincinnati Zoo The day Harambee was murdered.

Dicks out.

I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it's so easy to be a villain.

I was still up for Portillo, back in 1997.

What an amazing night. I had never known anything but Conservative government, so to see those corrupt, selfish bastards swept away was absolutely joyous in a way that's hard to fully capture in words.

Obviously the Blair government eventually completely fucked things up with Iraq, but at the time it felt like genuine liberation after years and years of sleaze and hatred.

And IMO things genuinely did change for the better in the UK with the Blair government, whether or not you agreed with every policy they had. Then Sept 11 happened, and Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world started going inexorably to shit, and it's never really recovered.

I had to deal with this. It was not satisfying at all.

I (well, supposedly) knew the guy who unleashed SQL Slammer and a small group of friends (into Ragnarok Online hacking/botting) sat around on IRC watching backbone router pings go apeshit until ISPs started blocking it. It was also amusing checking firewall logs to see whose servers were vulnerable.

I have piracy accounts older than my niece and nephew.

Had to call rackspace and get new credentials for a friend in Iraq after that massive raid.

I remember 9/11, I am a Swede and we were in school when suddenly there was an announcement of a minute of silence for the victims of a horrible attack.

It was only that evening I found out the true scope.

I was in the UK when the London bombs popped, I was in Bristol and the group I was with started talking about bombs and how we couldn't take the train back to Chippenham, I didn't get it untill we got back home and I watched the news. My parents were vacationing in Canada at the time, so I called them, letting them know I was fine, they never had time to be worried as they didn't know about the attack before I called them.

I was working my first year on a new (and frankly fantastic) job in the center of Stockholm when the dickhead stole a lorry and drove down Drottninggatan, mowing down shoppers and tourists. We put on the live news broadcast and stayed over for an hour or so at the office before people started getting home. The metro was closed, as were the busses in the center of the city as well as the large commuter trains, people just walked home or if they couldn't strangers offered others a couch to sleep on as well as dinner. My normal commute was a bus from the center of the city out to the closest bus stop to my apartment in the suburbs, but that bus was obviously cancelled. So I walked up to Stockholm East station, the nothern most stations of the central station in Stockholm, it is the terminus of the local narrow gauge railroad Roslagsbanan, it had service so I could get home that way...

The world before the Internet.

I was there. We had to go to the library if we wanted information. The magazine aisle at the grocery store is where you got your up to date info that you couldn't always get on TV. TV was like 5 channels. A few more local ones if you were lucky.

They're was nothing on TV after a certain hour. Just static, or colored bars and a buzzer. You had to wait till morning for TV broadcasts to start again.

No one had cell phones. You had to go to your friends house to see if they were home, and yell for them at their window.

Fun times.

I was there when Metallica tried to kill piracy by killing Napster and in turn, created a giant market of music piracy programs.

I was there when the Scranton Strangler drove past my office.

Now you take these and go buy yourself a space ship.

I remember borrowing CDs from friends and converting them to MP3s in the mid-late 90s. Admittedly I didn't really know what I was doing, so I couldn't really explain it to my friends, but ripping CDs with Windows CLI programs and amassing a huge (for the time) digital music collection was something I thought was super cool. Unlike wav files, I could actually (not always) fit a whole song on a floppy disc!

I was there visiting the GDR when it still existed, and I even met several people who talked (somewhat) openly how life is there.