Focusing more on the "social side" rather the HW part, there is the part about the "Viral email", which must have been something that went viral in the UK Internet circles but not outside (I don't remember it and Y2K Internet was much smaller). Well, investigating about it you can end up reading The Register "article" about it [1] and well, that's something that definitely would not be published nowadays. Names and surnames of all the people involved in it, the literal sentence of the viral email copypasted there. It really shows how a different time it was regarding privacy and personal data.
EDIT: I mean, things like this obviously keep happening nowadays in closed (and not so closed) social media circles, but you won't see an online publication putting down names in written form like that.
Y2K was different because we got to see different shapes, sizes and types of hardware because there were so many companies that produced them. Nowadays it’s most a monopoly or a duopoly and everyone tries to copy whatever that is released by Apple and it’s quite boring
It's because of all the added abstractions. 20-30 years ago you were closer to the metal, similarly to how you would play with arduino now. But now all you get is blackboxes which fogs the mind.
De-alienate yourself! Feel the tools again! Learn low-level concepts and use them in your work (data-driven design, functional programming, etc.).
I consulted for Deliverance a bit later than Y2K (probably in 2004/5). They were a very strange company internally at the time.
First I want to say they weren't really like Deliveroo because they had their own kitchens. Or to be specific, one kitchen in Bloomsbury which made every major style of food. It was actually quite an amazing kitchen, with a Japanese sushi chef working next to an Indian curry cook and a pizza oven and a load more. (The quality of the food was top notch.) They also had their own salaried call centre and delivery staff.
At the time I was consulting they had been losing money hand over fist for years and their investors had parachuted in a "high powered executive" to sort everything out. She had not the first clue about the business, or the Internet, or much else, but everyone in the company deferred to her because she was the new big boss and shouted a lot. She used to turn up in a massive silver car late, order the sushi chef to make her a meal (for free obviously), and then leave early every day. Most of our work involved explaining why her ideas for the website and online advertising couldn't possibly work, which was very painful for me and everyone else. I pushed really hard to introduce a mobile-friendly website and did all the work on it, making the food menus work on the terrible web browser on some high end phone (of the time). It was all canned because the investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.
The company folded or was sold for parts soon afterwards.
I remember wanting to be important by upgrading the size of my monitor from the default 14" to 21" but unfortuantely, it also took up 50% of your desk space so I split the difference and lived with 17".
My very first work experience in a small software house in 1996 and their internet connection was ISDN so it had to dial-up and then got the staggering speed of 64Kb/s, you could also hear it so occasionally the boss would ask who was using it i.e. costing whatever we were metered at, which was probably like £1 for 5 minutes.
The internet was a bit different more homely in those days. Back in 1996 we hired a guy as network administrator. On his first day at work, we got an email from a network admin who was reading Usenet. He'd seen our new guy had posted the root password for his former place of work on Usenet (as some kind of revenge for something or other) and had managed to work out where the guy was now working and our contact details. We frog-marched our new employee out of the door and changed all the passwords.
In 1999 I was the first person I knew to get a TFT flatscreen monitor. It had the awesome capability of 1024x768 resolution at 14".
Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 2001 after the collapse, from Zeus Technology who had a high performance single-thread select-based webserver. We could feel the cascade failure as our ISP customers went bankrupt or stopped paying their invoices.
Ah yes, back when caring about hardware was a thing.
Early 90s, new top-of-line Compaq arrives, for me, project manager. We open it to install network card - token ring (yes, it sucked to be you - you could almost see the little tokens slouching round the ring).
me: jesus, just look at that heat-sink!
male programmer: yeah, they really knocked it out with that anodised blue - can i get the next one?
I spy a copy of the "Cold Fusion Web Application Construction Kit"! I worked for Allaire in Sydney in 2000, then Macromedia when they got acquired in 2001. I used to visit a lot of studios like that. The dotcom boom was a wild ride.
A nice nostalgia hit. The "Bondi blue" iMac was my first workplace computer, for a local council. I had Photohop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress, making websites, banner graphics(!), print artwork, all kinds of things. Even then, I do remember the iMac being painfully slow.
Oh yeah, original iMac was slow, especially if running OS X. We had the full range of iMac G3s in school, easiest way to tell if you got a good one was if it had a CD slot instead of a tray. Those were the coolest PCs ever.
I spent an entire summer playing Warcraft 2 on Kali (before the Battle.net edition). What a memory and you are the first person to mention Kali in all the years since!
Focusing more on the "social side" rather the HW part, there is the part about the "Viral email", which must have been something that went viral in the UK Internet circles but not outside (I don't remember it and Y2K Internet was much smaller). Well, investigating about it you can end up reading The Register "article" about it [1] and well, that's something that definitely would not be published nowadays. Names and surnames of all the people involved in it, the literal sentence of the viral email copypasted there. It really shows how a different time it was regarding privacy and personal data.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010413114456/http://www.thereg...
EDIT: I mean, things like this obviously keep happening nowadays in closed (and not so closed) social media circles, but you won't see an online publication putting down names in written form like that.
Y2K was different because we got to see different shapes, sizes and types of hardware because there were so many companies that produced them. Nowadays it’s most a monopoly or a duopoly and everyone tries to copy whatever that is released by Apple and it’s quite boring
"When work felt like home"
Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes
It's because of all the added abstractions. 20-30 years ago you were closer to the metal, similarly to how you would play with arduino now. But now all you get is blackboxes which fogs the mind.
De-alienate yourself! Feel the tools again! Learn low-level concepts and use them in your work (data-driven design, functional programming, etc.).
Then it's like woodworking and cooking again.
These photos are incredible.
Would love to see a show with the seriousness and production quality of Mad Men but set in the 90s.
> Diesel jeans and jumper, Deliverance food box on the partition (decades before Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, etc).
Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P
I consulted for Deliverance a bit later than Y2K (probably in 2004/5). They were a very strange company internally at the time.
First I want to say they weren't really like Deliveroo because they had their own kitchens. Or to be specific, one kitchen in Bloomsbury which made every major style of food. It was actually quite an amazing kitchen, with a Japanese sushi chef working next to an Indian curry cook and a pizza oven and a load more. (The quality of the food was top notch.) They also had their own salaried call centre and delivery staff.
At the time I was consulting they had been losing money hand over fist for years and their investors had parachuted in a "high powered executive" to sort everything out. She had not the first clue about the business, or the Internet, or much else, but everyone in the company deferred to her because she was the new big boss and shouted a lot. She used to turn up in a massive silver car late, order the sushi chef to make her a meal (for free obviously), and then leave early every day. Most of our work involved explaining why her ideas for the website and online advertising couldn't possibly work, which was very painful for me and everyone else. I pushed really hard to introduce a mobile-friendly website and did all the work on it, making the food menus work on the terrible web browser on some high end phone (of the time). It was all canned because the investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.
The company folded or was sold for parts soon afterwards.
> Omni Trio being played regularly
that seals it.. my nostalgia for this time (from many an adult's tale in my young life) was not misplaced.
If only it still felt like this, you can see it sometimes, if only a little. And maybe we'll feel the same way looking back to now from what will be.
I remember wanting to be important by upgrading the size of my monitor from the default 14" to 21" but unfortuantely, it also took up 50% of your desk space so I split the difference and lived with 17".
My very first work experience in a small software house in 1996 and their internet connection was ISDN so it had to dial-up and then got the staggering speed of 64Kb/s, you could also hear it so occasionally the boss would ask who was using it i.e. costing whatever we were metered at, which was probably like £1 for 5 minutes.
The internet was a bit different more homely in those days. Back in 1996 we hired a guy as network administrator. On his first day at work, we got an email from a network admin who was reading Usenet. He'd seen our new guy had posted the root password for his former place of work on Usenet (as some kind of revenge for something or other) and had managed to work out where the guy was now working and our contact details. We frog-marched our new employee out of the door and changed all the passwords.
In 1999 I was the first person I knew to get a TFT flatscreen monitor. It had the awesome capability of 1024x768 resolution at 14".
Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 2001 after the collapse, from Zeus Technology who had a high performance single-thread select-based webserver. We could feel the cascade failure as our ISP customers went bankrupt or stopped paying their invoices.
Ah yes, back when caring about hardware was a thing.
Early 90s, new top-of-line Compaq arrives, for me, project manager. We open it to install network card - token ring (yes, it sucked to be you - you could almost see the little tokens slouching round the ring).
me: jesus, just look at that heat-sink!
male programmer: yeah, they really knocked it out with that anodised blue - can i get the next one?
female tech lead: you sad, sad bastards.
I spy a copy of the "Cold Fusion Web Application Construction Kit"! I worked for Allaire in Sydney in 2000, then Macromedia when they got acquired in 2001. I used to visit a lot of studios like that. The dotcom boom was a wild ride.
A nice nostalgia hit. The "Bondi blue" iMac was my first workplace computer, for a local council. I had Photohop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress, making websites, banner graphics(!), print artwork, all kinds of things. Even then, I do remember the iMac being painfully slow.
Oh yeah, original iMac was slow, especially if running OS X. We had the full range of iMac G3s in school, easiest way to tell if you got a good one was if it had a CD slot instead of a tray. Those were the coolest PCs ever.
Goatse... Ouch that brings back memories.
Hit me up if you want to build a 2000-era (V)LAN:
- XMPP Chat
- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)
Then let's game!
Dang, I think I lost my Kali [0] license-key. :p
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)
I spent an entire summer playing Warcraft 2 on Kali (before the Battle.net edition). What a memory and you are the first person to mention Kali in all the years since!
and now thanks to outsourcing and AI no one can make a living this way again.