alt Hacker NewsLet's all meet up in the Y2K
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> 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
"When work felt like home"
Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes
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.
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
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.
These photos are incredible.
Would love to see a show with the seriousness and production quality of Mad Men but set in the 90s.
"High prices shame Britain" made me chuckle
> 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.
Hit me up if you want to build a 2000-era (V)LAN:
- XMPP Chat
- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)
Then let's game!
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.
and now thanks to outsourcing and AI no one can make a living this way again.
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). 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.