#eternalseptember — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #eternalseptember, aggregated by home.social.
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Back in 1993, I went to get another degree to just to get internet access, which was one of the few ways to get it back then. We had VAX and Unix, both fine platforms, hundreds of students would log in to one CPU from a terminal on campus or the house. We were connected to the world and communications were fast. I remember that's when the entire continent of Australia was connected by a pair of 2MB cables at the time. We had many distributed servers for news, email, IRC, gopher, etc, but it was lightning fast. Engineers at companies put tech documents on ftp servers. The internet was a big world library and the world was free. #JavaScript wasn't invented yet to slow us down or bury us in popups and advertisements. The entire internet was ad-free and advertising was a ban offense.
Then one morning I remember what would be known as #EternalSeptember, thanks to #AOL. And the #CanterSiegel spam happened. And the real cranks invaded. Many of us banned every .com address to regain sanity. This is when investors invaded the internet to hype it up into television quality. At least we still have #Wikipedia, #InternetArchive, and #Mastodon. Watching #Bluesky open up the floodgates to fascists was obvious to those of us who remember the past. -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@onthisday/115673398971761625
I was working for SkyCache. We did satellite usenet and web cache pre-injection, saving ISPs money on transit costs. This lawsuit had a second order effect of dropping transit usage for those same ISPs. They stopped paying for our service.
It was a weird time on the internet. Prior to the lawsuit, a burst of innovation and scaling network capacities to accommodate the demand of P2P apps. With Napster falling and the dotCom bubble bursting all in the same time frame, the industry stagnated for a while. It was unfathomable to think we wouldn't need to keep scaling our network equipment, then overnight, *crickets*.
I think we're about to see the exact same thing happen with datacenters, GPUs, and electricity thanks to AI.
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"The Internet is full! Go away!"
R.I.P. Erik Naggum
One of my first encounters with the Internet in the mid 90s was an article in some consumer IT magazine, where Erik Naggum greeted the newcomers sporting this t-shirt.
Other names to mention from Usenet was the bold keyboard jockeys Inge Lindland, Jarle Aase, Jarle Synnevåg , Peter Svaar undsoweiter....
That said, my first ever theoretical encounter with this behemoth was in 1991 and an article the anarchist paper Gateavisa - which was much more open to curious newbies. In their guide to the Internet - the fun started at the newsgoups and the alt.* hierarchy!
#eternalseptember #LISP #internetculture #Gateavisa
