Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed.
I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury. Radical industry/political reforms, striking poverty, unimaginable wealth, obscene pollution. Women's suffrage. Radio, traveling circuses and vaudeville, mass consumerism, magazines, torpedos, and a world war. Oh my!
Looking through my great-grandfather's scrapbook (he lived outside Detroit) is absolutely mind-blowing. The stuff he (and especially his father) saw are hard to put into a continuous world. His letters describing the "number of autoes" he passed on the way to visit relatives bleeds giddiness and awe.
The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.
Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) went from developing early airplanes to seeing the development of international travel and the jet engine. He lived until 1948 and his last flight was in a Lockheed Constellation[1]
In computer science we are similarly privileged. We've gone from basic ideas of transistors and turing machines to having a global network of interconnected supercomputers in our pockets.
Quite interesting that super-sonic flight was achieved 1946. I don't know if Orville was informed, but imagine that - from barely flying to supersonic in 40 years.
Seems to work for big scientific theories as well, more or less. Although an alternative explanation is that after 50 or so most of the original group of people driving the development will be gone, and as a result you end up with several loosely connected but separate developments. Which isn't really a sign of maturity, but merely a lack of coherence.
> The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.
On the other hand though, I still feel like the analog computers they used back in the day are technologies from the future, not from the past.
I think I've been cured of this bias by seeing a lot of videos of analog modular synthesizers, which share the patch-cable programming techniques of analog computers. Analog systems can do some interesting things, and they have a nice physicality to them. The noise, instability, feedback, and imperfections in analog synthesis have an aesthetic appeal that has only matured with time. In ease of programming, though, simple imperative code feels like a huge release - you can actually follow the execution flow top to bottom, and the syntax makes it trivial to define many mathematical ideas.
Does it? If that's the perception, it seems unwarranted to me.
Edit: I guess the point is that most of the tech products available at home in the 90's were completely absent in the 60's. There were ancient-looking telephones, TVs and radios but no old ancient-looking walkmans, cell phones, PCs, gameboys, VCRs, modems or web sites.
I was in a flight yesterday and thought about that. Our generation is crazy, but then I've always taken flying for granted, I've flew airplanes all my life. I can't imagine how it must have been for people before me to discover these huge things that could transport you km away.
I wonder if community was more central to life back then. With the world being so large I'd speculate/imagine that "place" and the people in that place were more unique. Maybe more intimate at times.
I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to get us to blog on their platform and chat with other students in the fresher's forum in 2004.
And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search which doesn't involve typing postcodes, I just logged into a popular uh... people-meeting service that fundamentally hasn't changed design since earlier than 2004, and it was dated-looking then.
The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus.
For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring!
Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else.
I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial.
The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook.
...yet the original version still got popular.
That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!
Haha. Remember when they first introduced apps and they had access to everything? So people were tracking who was viewing your photos the most etc. It was the Wild West out there.
> The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008
It wasn't that late. At early as 2005, there was a form with the prompt "John Doe is:" and you had to squeeze whatever thoughts you needed your friends to know into that format.
First of all, mini-feed launched in Sep, 2006, according to a TechCrunch post from that time. That was the real time Facebook started to be anything near what it is today, and certainly well before status updates.
I first noticed people using status updates in March 2008, how do I know month and year, you ask? because there was serious shit going on on my life at the time. And I remember reading "X is blah blah blah" for the first time while I was going through my shit. It was new enough to notice. I'll conceed that the "status feature" may have existed a year before I really noticed it, so we are still at early 2007 two years earlier than 2005.
I also do recall the criticism of "you're copying Twitter" as a sibling posted.
I remember using the brand new Facebook chat about April or May 2008, FWIW.
I wasn't on it in March 2004, but things like the Wall on individual profiles came very early and even other long-gone features like the metadata on favourite bands anticipated the like graph they ultimately ended up with. The thing I remember most about the mini feed was how much people complained when it was introduced...
I've had people ask me why I always refer to it as "the facebook" and its fun explaining to people that that really was what it was called at the time I signed up. Also, "the facebook" was late to my college campus (relatively) so we hopped through a small collection of facebooks. It's weird today that most people don't realize there were multiple competitive facebooks or that it was essentially a generic term before it was a brand...
It's especially weird when I see people roll their eyes or laugh at someone say my grandmother's age referring to it as "the facebook", because to them its quaint and elderly, and I'm tempted to break out the "get off my lawn, that's what it has always been called" speech... Internet history is weird.
I remember, but it was really quite different than what you'd think of as a chat. I'd write something on your wall and you'd reply by posting something on my wall two days later. Everyone saw both. That was the only chat available. There was very little interactivity.
The wall was mostly equivalent to scrawling something in a public bathroom, hence the name.
>> And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search.
Still remember ATT Mobile in early 2001 had a "find me" service you could use to find your friends. It was like a messenger app you logged into and then it would show you where your friends were located on a google maps interface. Then you could text or chat with him.
They used the example of a guy who wins some concert tickets and wants to invite his friends that are nearby. It showed him logged in and then bringing up the messaging interface and showing three friends all within a few block radius. He sends out a group text about the tickets and they agree to meet at the bar in 15 minutes. I really thought it was a clever use of GPS and felt this was really the future of "smart" phones.
I tried to sell that shit to everybody I knew and everybody instantly freaked about their phone transmitting where they were and how it would violate their privacy, etc, etc.
It's like things are accelerating isn't it? I remember trying to convince people they should sign up for email accounts in like 1992, I remember them looking at me like I was trying to sell them on a cult. Those people staring at me were such fucking dinosaurs they lost siblings to polio. Imagine that craziness. Now I feel like if I don't have a cyberbrain by 2022 it will be a huge letdown.
According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015.
Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.
Yeah, if people stops vaccinating their kids, then the numbers would obviously go up instead of down. It's pretty scary that a lot of people don't realize this.
I assumed there is some sort of rivalry between Stanford and Cornell - I'm not in US so I wouldn't know. But you would not see this kind of statement in a paper nowadays, that's for sure.
>The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.
The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong.
Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?
Written by James Cameron and directed by his then-wife Kathryn Bigelow. It's such a great movie. And has a great track by Peter Gabriel at the end as well!
The very ending is a little bit cheesy. But apart from that, it's a great ride.
The interesting thing about it, in relation to this thread, is that they consciously tried not to extrapolate too far technologically (apart from the whole record all your experiences thing); in fact, pretty much the only noticeable advance is speech to text translation on voicemail.
Some legit stupid outfits as well. Very 90s-cool...
It was cheesey. The focus of the conspiracy was the political assassination of a musician, except whenever movies try to fictionalize a wildly popular artist, it usually deflates the premise because you're forced into imagining why the artist is so popular.
The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah.
Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much.
With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
I actually thought the 'rapper' had some decent-power beat poetry going on, and measured up favourably against real-world artists (talk about backhanded compliments...)
Put it this way, the music is patently artificial, if it exists solely within the scope of the fiction.
If the producers were not willing to cast a known artist, and granting creative freedom to compose real music, which would then be included on the official motion picture sound track, it's assuredly contrived, although it might be appealing.
Further driving this fact home is that, the actor cast in the role did not further his career as a musician, and no one claims credit for composing authentic music. This is a telling clue that it was composed expressly as a believable, high-quality prop. The people who made it were paid specifically to craft the music to fill the space required for the plot of the movie.
Now, take authentic music from other movies, which has been composed by a career musician, which then gets used as part of a sound track years later. It comes through, as obviously good, because it's selected for its high quality, as a known quantity.
Similarly, observe career musicians that have played roles in movies. Even if their acting sucks, usually their musical contributions still shine.
When examined in this way, the cheesey nature of the prop music is evident. This sort of perception is tough to balance, when asking people to suspend disbelief for the duration of the movie. It's hard to pull someone into the world of a movie, and then ask them to be impressed by someone who is not famous, and show them a world that is moved by his music when the music isn't truly moving.
Beyond that, we weren't even permitted to become emotionally invested in the character. Even though the circumstances of his demise are villified, there's no depth to his martyrdom because we don't bond with the character. We bond with the underground experience brokering brain-hacker main character. This is where the movie falls short, with respect to the weak cover-up conspiracy theory.
"A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946."
> The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.
I don't disagree, it does feel very surreal to reflect on life in the 1990s. But put in context, a lot can happen in 15 years. I mean, imagine living through the era 1930 to 1945. From the days of flappers and the Charleston to Nazism and atomic bombs.
In the distant future, when they discover the endless jars of eggs and sperm in Mark Zuckerberg's basement, somewhere, Chris Holt will be saying "I told you so."
They did when they ran PHP. Now they compile their PHP to C++ so it'll run faster and with less CPU and cooling requirements.
Also, writing PHP is easier than C++ so it's beneficial in that they get a wider pool of developers to use, and they can pay less.
Genius really.
So, now their server farms must be a cover-up, or they're using an old version of MySQL that kept a lot of its clustering data in RAM and are afraid it'll bomb out :-)
Though satire, the fake Moskovitz quote was interesting: "I don’t want to elaborate too much on our end goal / purpose, but I will say we are not without a plan."
I wonder at what point it became clear to Facebook that they were sitting on a targeted advertising goldmine? Surely it was not on the minds of Zuckerberg and Moskovitz (or anyone else!) in the company's early years.
That's exactly the purpose a literal face book served before Facebook implemented a digital equivalent. Granted, it's not been the sole purpose of the site for quite a while, but originally that was the value proposition for users.
Back in 2009, you could join, I think, two "networks" and easily search and browse within those networks, firing off messages to anyone who seemed interesting. IIRC, that functionality disappeared a few years ago. Now FB is almost entirely a way to connect with people you already know, rather than a way to actually meet people.
Not sure why the author is so perplexed about thefacebook.com. Friendster and Myspace were already in existence and popular. Facebook was just another competitor with slightly different features (or lack there of (no customizations))
> Al Capone used something similar in the 1930s called “themugshot.com” and more recently, Martha Stewart used “itsagoodthing.com” to form her “Living” cadre. It’s practically the oldest trick in the book.
I don't quite really understand this 'oldest trick in the book.'. Can anyone explain what this so called scheme is? Thank you!
Infiltrating the ranks of your enemy? Basically, if he got most of the smart people in their 20s as users of the site, it would take that longer for someone to uncover his operations. That's what Al Capone did, though I have no idea about Martha Stewart.
I remember being able to look up who was in your class. Facebook was so much more enjoyable when it was just university students, it was more fun, playful, and I guess innocent.
Since facebook expanded outside of universities its become more generic, and corporate and lost its "joie de vivre"
You could search for people with a favorite movie, then filter by dorm. You'd write on their wall, invariably the person who listed the movie would own it on DVD, you'd walk over and borrow it.
It was such a tight-knit community you could go "I saw you on facebook, can I have your stuff? Don't worry I'm on facebook too and will give it back"
I also remember not wanting to join facebook because it used your real name. I was so use to using nicknames/handles/avatars etc that the thought of using your real name was uncomfortable to me.
I must have been one of the last people on campus to sign up
Wow, what a hysterical compendium of excellence. You know, it's optional that people use such services, and I think that once cooler shaz comes out people will drop it like it's hot, to quote a contemporary philosopher.
Is there Stanford vs. Cornell shade? Ivy Leaguers get touchy when Stanford people call themselves an Ivy (hell they get touchy that Penn is an Ivy) but is there actual direct beef?
This domain could be the current-day equivalent of the famous Red Paperclip of a decade ago. The opportunities for "value creation" are the stuff of movies. I'll watch with interest what happens to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
I remember it used to be an advanced OS class about a decade ago. I'm not sure why it would be considered that challenging as opposed to any other graduate-level class (especially the theory ones)...
I'll just comment on the stanforddaily website how clean it looked and loaded fast even without any crap like AMP. Just compare it to the current site.
The hilarious thing: I have this CSS book, and it bangs on about how old skool table based layouts, and styling with old skool HTML elements, is BAD because it leads to slow loading, bloated web pages. And speaking purely from a technical perspective, that could be true... but the reality. Like you say, we went the other way. Any of those old 90s/early noughties sites is going to be rocket fast by comparison with many modern sites.
Bootstrap is fine - frankly it's stuff that should have been the browser defaults already. There's no reason that something like motherfuckingwebsite shouldn't, in a modern browser, look like it would under bootstrap (that is to say, it should have thin but nonzero margins, high-contrast text but maybe slightly off-black on off-white, and any form controls should be bigger than the standard browser ones).
That is crazy. Why make it an entirely new syntax with an entirely new lexicon? Bgc () instead of background-colour?
I feel like new people keep entering the web field and forgetting all the lessons learned from the (very very recent) past.
The inline approach might work for a small site. But in that case, why use a pre-processor at all and why would you need config objects?
CSS doesn't need to be rocket science. If you want atomic CSS then leverage CSS and style the base elements, it's actually pretty good at what it does.
Edit: I may have misinterpreted it's use case, I am all for compenent based styles. I still think there is no need for a pre-processor of inline styles with a completely new lexicon. If you are already in the context of a component you already have the beauty of a scoped and simplified CSS workspace, why make that so much more complicated with a new build pipeline and completely new syntax and lexicon?
I wonder how much of those entering The Web Field have any formal education on CS and CS history, and to what extent most of them know the tools at their hand (HTML, JS, CSS, Standards, HTTP(S), browsers, other programming tools, etc). It seems to me that most of the professionals in the sector are actually paid amateurs with shallow knowledge of their own fields. This leads to reinvention of tools for that are at most on par with the existing tool chain.
I have a similar impression; and based on the people I've met, it's somewhat accurate. People with higher education in CS I know tend to go more towards full stack or back end work, while web front end devs often are career changers.
The entry barrier for web technologies is just rather low. This is probably the main reason for Node's huge growth in the past years: It's just the path of least resistance to get into back end development.
"The Web Field" is a pretty big group but if you mean "Front end web" then people with a background in graphic design or content creation (writing/video) are probably not going to have much formal CS history.
There _are_ people who are good at both visual design and computer science, but not as many as designers who learned enough to code what they needed to.
Yeah, it feels like somebody's taken some sensible advice from the HTTP 1.1 era too far. (I realise we're still very much in the tail end of the HTTP 1.1 era.)
Putting styles needed to render your above the fold content inside <head> is a sensible thing to do, assuming you've been able to restrain yourself by not animating the buggery out of everything, and have kept your stylesheet small. It saves a roundtrip to the server or CDN that will block your content from rendering.
Putting all your styles inline? Sheer madness. Inventing your own syntax to do it? Even worse. The whole thing with CSS is, used well, it does actually reduce page weight vs. old skool HTML table and element based styling. You lose all that if you start bunging all your styles inline.
Still, I suppose if your page is already 4 #@<£ing megabytes because of all the crap you've cargo-culted in, maybe it doesn't matter so much. </snark>
I've been saying for years, once we stopped hand-writing HTML there was no reason to use CSS, at least in the "cascading" sense. Whatever generates your content should generate the styling - HTML is already a presentation form, and you already have a component that renders your semantic content into HTML for view.
Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just adds to the noise.
> No megabytes of css
Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.
> no bootstrap
Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.
> No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute.
Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
It's not that the tools are bad, it's that they are the goto for building sites. Sites that typically end up worse for having used them.
It's an industry wide issue that we keep trying to solve using shitty duct-tape and hacks, while not addressing the underlying problem.
This is just a reaction to that (and one that I agree with)
Edit:
> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.
Dunno, but people keep doing it for some reason
> Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availability at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.
Bootstrap can be, but IME it typically isn't. Additionally, I constantly hear webdevs say it "makes mobile better", but I tend to disagree. I admit that this is purely opinion.
> Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
Pretty much every webdev I talk to. Admittedly not necessarily webpack but usually something similar.
I do understand that good tools being misused aren't bad tools, but, as a user, you can't expect me to be happy when I see those or similar tools when most of your industry is abusing them.
> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site
Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte.
> a big win in productivity/quality
Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not
>Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.
>> Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte.
Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance.
Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap.
> a big win in productivity/quality
>> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not
That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads around form elements, and see all the things they fixed.
> Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
>> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...]
I'll rather browse WAP pages again compared to modern "mobile optimized" sites. Huge fonts, huge pictures (sadly this trend came back to desktop, what's information density again), sticky toolbars with retarded social icons, ads that make a multicore mobile device with several GB of RAM to hiccup, etc. Desktop view was fine.
I feel like while they were inspired by some concepts from there, the biggest contributor to the idea (apart from the need of locking in people in one 'easily acessible' platform) was opera's OBML format/protocol which was really decent at the time and provided a lot of benefits AML is marketed for. Probably the only problem with it was the lack of any interactive javascript, and that where it failed to meet adoption. Oh, but well, it was really niche as well, that did nothing good too.
Meh. There are tools that can be misused on accident and there are tools that you have to go out of your way and have technical knowledge to misuse. And then there are tools where misuse is the default, and you have to have special or technical knowledge to use well.
So which specific tool are you laying this accusation at? Bootstrap, which has been refined into tiny Sass and Less modules, and which for people who use neither, has the customize link in its main nav?
Nope, as a Jewish guy I've not heard that anti-semetic trope before, seems like that must be a pretty uncommon trope to have heard. Do people really call Jewish people rats, where you're from?
I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me.
The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.