Subj : Re: Old Geek Thoughts...
To   : GeekWisdom
From : Vk3jed
Date : Wed Dec 29 2021 19:01:00

-=> On 12-29-21 14:42, GeekWisdom wrote to All <=-

 Ge> A few intersting observations over the years:

 Ge> In the 80/90's if you new how to "make" the computer 'do anything' you
 Ge> were considered a computer 'genius'. With each passing year, this
 Ge> becomes exponentially more difficult to impress someone.

True. :)

 Ge> The invention of the GUI and the MOUSE, saw a huge increase in computer
 Ge> usage, which later exploded with the invention of the web and the web
 Ge> browser.  It also saw a large decrease in productivity, open a black
 Ge> box 'DOS PROMPT' and people start to get scared you are messing with
 Ge> the 'internals'

Haha, some call it the "Black box of death" :D  On Linux, there's always
multiple shells open here. :)

 Ge> There are so many areas a person can specialize in with computers. You
 Ge> can literally go your whole life doing nothing but administring Oracle
 Ge> databases, without knowing anything about how to script in a batch
 Ge> language.

It's diversified so much, that's for sure.

 Ge> Usenet (Newsgroups) were once a fun (free) place to hop onto and read
 Ge> lots of interesting thoughts from people all around the world. Today
 Ge> Usenet is mostly a spot for downloading pirated content, and you have
 Ge> to pay to access it.

I used to be active on Usenet, back in the day, before it turned into a cesspit
of (mainly) spam.

 Ge> "Online" orginally meant logging onto a BBS, CompuServe/AOL Literally,
 Ge> you were

 Ge> on "using the phone line" at least until your mom picked up the house
 Ge> phone and

 Ge> @$%S23450s@@^ NO CARRIER filled up on your screen.

Yep!

 Ge> Chatting with someone Online was done over text only, later came IRC,
 Ge> and then ICQ. Today there are hundreds of messaging apps, such as
 Ge> discord and telegram, basically the same 'old'  thing re-invented in a
 Ge> 'new' way

Over here, there was a BBS called "The Talk Channel" that had access numbers in
most of the major cities across Australia.  There were multitudes of chat
rooms, and people used to camp on until the lines filled up and it was their
turn to be kicked.  It was expensive, except they were rather slack enforcing
the trial period, and a week's trial ended up being 6 months or more. :)

Anyway, a few years later, I graduated to IRC, but by 1995, I was experimenting
with VoIP, using Speak Freely - which lives on today inside the heart of IRLP
(ham radio RoIP software).  I've pretty much the gamut of chat systems, though
I detest Snapchat (only use it for a couple of people who insist on it) and
have zero interest in TikTok.  My text chatting these days is done on a mix of
FB Messenger, Discord and Telegram with a dash of WhatsApp and Kik thrown in.
)

 Ge> Channels were once a physical knob on a television that you switched,
 Ge> and the very idea that video could be streamed over the network was
 Ge> laughable. It would

Audio came early for me.

 Ge> take hours just to download an image! How could it be possible to send
 Ge> moving video? Today my kids don't even watch tv shows. The majority of
 Ge> the time it's YouTube videos, or maybe once in a while Netflix or
 Ge> Disney+

Times have certainly changed!

 Ge> So yes -I'm an old G33k. And I think that many of the young folks out
 Ge> there don't know half of the history of what made the world the way it
 Ge> is today... and those that fail to learn from history...well you get
 Ge> the idea !

 Ge> Are you an old geek like me????

 Ge> What other things can you think of?

Yeah I'm an old geek.  My first experinece of web browsing was running Lynx on
a remote Unix server (BSDi, I think) in glorious text, and any downloads, I had
to first download to the ISP's server, then use "sz" to transfer it to my PC.
)


.... Nationalise crime, and make sure it doesn't pay.
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