I was there.

It's mostly rose tinted glasses.

There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.

In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).

Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.

When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.

I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!

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bigstrat2003 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was also there. It isn't rose-colored glasses. The tech truly was better back in the 90s and 2000s. Not perfect, certainly, but it was made by people who gave a damn and were trying to actually make good things. It wasn't like today, where most software is slop (not necessarily AI slop, but slop nonetheless) churned out by companies whose decisions are made solely by how much profit they can squeeze out no matter if the quality tanks.

No, we really did lose something along the way.

	▲	nl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It wasn't like today, where most software is slop Did you ever use Window 3.1? Or any windows software? Are you forgetting the multiple crashes per day? Or the incessant playing with system.cfg to get MSDOS drivers to work? And Linux was only better because it didn't do much. The only hardware damage software has ever caused was some 1994 Linux driver for a Trident video card getting a frequency wrong and frying a monitor. > churned out by companies whose decisions are made solely by how much profit they can squeeze out no matter if the quality tanks. As opposed to 1990's Microsoft or IBM?