Wow, this site has been around since 1999! WTF

[Kuronekoㅤㅤ]

Really cool to see

https://web.archive.org/web/19991118041241/http://animeforums.net:80/cgi-animeforums/forums/help.cgi

[RZ.]

Wayback machine is awesome! I started becoming involved with forums and the internet in general around 2008-09, so I was a relative late-comer. I sometimes I wonder what it was like back then in the late 90s and early 2000s, especially in anime circles. A time when Inuyasha and Serial Experiments Lain would be classed as currently airing...

[efaardvark]

13 hours ago, RZ. said:

I sometimes I wonder what it was like back then in the late 90s..

Online?  Not so great tbh.  In the late 90s/early naughties for most people bandwidth was measured in kilobytes per second.  (My own 'Net connection was a unix-based NetBSD system with an on-demand dialup PPP link through a 56k modem.)  Being on unix, my main browser was Mosaic.   Yahoo was basically just a collection of symlinks.  google as we know it basically didn't exist either. Archie and gopher were the go-to protocols for search & download.  Youtube didn't exist until 2005.  Streaming of any sort really didn't exist.  Certainly video was painful, if you can even call grainy, postage-stamp sized slideshows "video".  Lo-fi audio (32kbps mp3) was just barely possible on higher-end consumer hardware.  Even 64kbps encoding doesn't fit through a "56k" modem that usually didn't get anywhere near that in practice.  Neither did social media exist until Friendster came along in the early/mid naughties. 

My main hangouts in the 90s/00s were usenet and IRC.  (Undernet mainly, since EFnet had issues).  There actually were some decent anime channels, but it was all text based.  Again, typically available bandwidth pretty much precluded downloads or streaming.  Even the occasional posts of (uuencoded) pictures was often frowned upon as too bandwidth intensive for the main channel and the .binary channels/groups were always full of .. stuff.  Interesting, but often quite, er.. well, let's just say "off-topic" material.  Email was still pretty primitive too - often text-only - and I actually was still doing a significant amount of online activity via BBS through my local  fidonet node.  That and GEnie.  (Anyone ever play a text-based online RPG called Dragons Gate?  At $0.10/minute in data charges and 1200 characters per second probably not, or at least not for long.)

Edited August 12, 2021 by efaardvark

[RZ.]

On 8/12/2021 at 5:06 AM, efaardvark said:

Online?  Not so great tbh.  In the late 90s/early naughties for most people bandwidth was measured in kilobytes per second.  (My own 'Net connection was a unix-based NetBSD system with an on-demand dialup PPP link through a 56k modem.)  Being on unix, my main browser was Mosaic.   Yahoo was basically just a collection of symlinks.  google as we know it basically didn't exist either. Archie and gopher were the go-to protocols for search & download.  Youtube didn't exist until 2005.  Streaming of any sort really didn't exist.  Certainly video was painful, if you can even call grainy, postage-stamp sized slideshows "video".  Lo-fi audio (32kbps mp3) was just barely possible on higher-end consumer hardware.  Even 64kbps encoding doesn't fit through a "56k" modem that usually didn't get anywhere near that in practice.  Neither did social media exist until Friendster came along in the early/mid naughties. 

My main hangouts in the 90s/00s were usenet and IRC.  (Undernet mainly, since EFnet had issues).  There actually were some decent anime channels, but it was all text based.  Again, typically available bandwidth pretty much precluded downloads or streaming.  Even the occasional posts of (uuencoded) pictures was often frowned upon as too bandwidth intensive for the main channel and the .binary channels/groups were always full of .. stuff.  Interesting, but often quite, er.. well, let's just say "off-topic" material.  Email was still pretty primitive too - often text-only - and I actually was still doing a significant amount of online activity via BBS through my local  fidonet node.  That and GEnie.  (Anyone ever play a text-based online RPG called Dragons Gate?  At $0.10/minute in data charges and 1200 characters per second probably not, or at least not for long.)

Damn, I knew there wasn't any meaningful video or audio back then and that everything was text-based. I didn't realise it was so expensive to browse the internet back then. The technological advancement in the last 20 years really has been astounding.

[efaardvark]

3 hours ago, RZ. said:

I didn't realise it was so expensive to browse the internet back then.

The 'Net itself was actually pretty cheap, once you were on.  Places like Compuserve and GEnie had additional usage charges over and above the carriers' (AT&T, etc.)  Once you were past the gatekeepers however the 'Net was actually one of the cheapest hangouts.  That's why GEnie, Compuserve, etc. aren't around anymore.  I liked GEnie's Dragons Gate a lot, but at between $6 and $25/hr (depending on time of day, etc.) to play it just wasn't within reach of most people.  Then the 'Net came along and offered telnet access to free MOOs & MUDs running on computers in enthusiasts' basements for no additional charge over whatever your carrier was charging.  Wasn't that hard for people to set up their own server either so there were 1000s of them.  (I even ran a CircleMUD of my own once upon a time.)  A lot of people could connect to those basement servers for "free" via their work or school 'Net connection too.  Employers even often used "free internet access" as a lure for employees, especially during the "dot com" years.  (At least until the crash came.)

 

3 hours ago, RZ. said:

The technological advancement in the last 20 years really has been astounding.

This is quite true, and not just in communications.  RNA vaccines, 100% reusable orbital rockets, 3d printing... the list is long.  If only our politics had made similar advancements over the same time frame.   

Edited August 14, 2021 by efaardvark

[RZ.]

17 hours ago, efaardvark said:

This is quite true, and not just in communications.  RNA vaccines, 100% reusable orbital rockets, 3d printing... the list is long.  If only our politics had made similar advancements over the same time frame.   

Internet caused politics to regress in a way. Well, more like it caused electorates to regress. People used to believe whatever they read in the newspapers or saw on the TV, which isn't good, but it kept things relatively harmonious when it came to the ballot box. The Internet has opened up us up to unfiltered media, both truthful and false. It's created a world where we're forced to question everything and trust nothing, except for that which reinforces our existing beliefs.

[efaardvark]

30 minutes ago, RZ. said:

Internet caused politics to regress in a way. Well, more like it caused electorates to regress. People used to believe whatever they read in the newspapers or saw on the TV, which isn't good, but it kept things relatively harmonious when it came to the ballot box. The Internet has opened up us up to unfiltered media, both truthful and false. It's created a world where we're forced to question everything and trust nothing, except for that which reinforces our existing beliefs.

I don't think it was the 'Net that created that world.  I mean, there's that saying, "Believe nothing of what you hear, and half of what you see", that predates the 'Net by a century at least.  It has always been the case that people had to decide what to believe and what information sources they were going to trust.  It is certainly true that the filtering is much more easily bypassed in the Internet era but the only thing that I'd credit(?) the 'Net with is making it a lot easier for people to find the "echo chambers" where they could connect with other like-minded individuals.  Ultimately the only thing that the 'Net is good for is facilitating communication after all.  It doesn't itself create the ideas - good or bad - it just makes it easier for them to be communicated.

If we're playing the blame game I'd blame an education system that switched from teaching people -how- to think to telling people -what- to think.  (That and the fact that the "what" was so obviously false and self-serving of the powers-that-be that people rejected it in favor of narratives pulled from said echo chambers.)  IMHO we would be in a lot better shape if we'd had a culture that valued - and enforced, socially-speaking - critical-thinking skills before the likes of Facebook came along.  As it is, most people are no more prepared to protect themselves from the cesspit of viral memes that they're exposed to online than the natives of the Americas were able to protect themselves from smallpox and other diseases brought over from Europe.

[RZ.]

17 hours ago, efaardvark said:

It has always been the case that people had to decide what to believe and what information sources they were going to trust. 

This is what I was getting at I think. Back in the day there was only really TV and newspapers that could be classed as "reliable" (obviously they weren't, but they would generally be classed as more relable than some random guy you've never seen before). Now the internet has given the random guy we've never seen before, and thousands of them at thtat, a platform equal to that of the media companies. People have always had to choose what they do and don't trust, there's just far more to choose from these days.

17 hours ago, efaardvark said:

If we're playing the blame game I'd blame an education system that switched from teaching people -how- to think to telling people -what- to think.  (That and the fact that the "what" was so obviously false and self-serving of the powers-that-be that people rejected it in favor of narratives pulled from said echo chambers.)  IMHO we would be in a lot better shape if we'd had a culture that valued - and enforced, socially-speaking - critical-thinking skills before the likes of Facebook came along.  As it is, most people are no more prepared to protect themselves from the cesspit of viral memes that they're exposed to online than the natives of the Americas were able to protect themselves from smallpox and other diseases brought over from Europe

In my experience at least, the only subject that ever taught me proper critical thinking skills was Sociology, and maybe History to an extent. Were things really so different before the Internet though? It may have been different here in Europe, but it's hard to imagine the US education system had much time for critical thinking or teaching people "how" to think during the height of the Cold War.

[efaardvark]

13 hours ago, RZ. said:

Were things really so different before the Internet though? It may have been different here in Europe, but it's hard to imagine the US education system had much time for critical thinking or teaching people "how" to think during the height of the Cold War.

I think so, or at least in past days it was a lot easier for the average joe to understand enough to get by and be an effective voter.  The flip side of there being so much cool technology available these days is that it is harder to understand it all, both at the individual subject level and as a %age of the overall body of human knowledge.  At the same time as society has been getting more complex and more dependent on technology, schools have been backing off from requiring actual skills or knowledge for academic advancement in favor of "participation" and the like. 

Even in my day* there was a requirement to take both a "shop" class like wood- or metalworking, and a "science" class like physics, biology, or chemistry.  This at the middle-school level.  There were also electives like "home economics" that were available (and encouraged).  These days the middle school I went to doesn't offer anything like a shop or home-ec class anymore, and subjects like physics or biology are only available to the "university track" students at the HS level.   It becomes a problem when people can graduate from HS without decent adulting skills, sometimes even without being able to read and write.  How can we expect those people to be able to resist the latest 'Net meme?  Never mind effectively exercise their management & oversight responsibilities as voters and politicians in a world that's increasingly dependent on science and technology!

 

*I graduated HS in '82 so this was definitely before the 'Net.  Even (mostly) before the personal computer era.  I think I touched my first personal computer - an Apple ][ - in the late 70s.  The IBM PC didn't come along until the early 80s.  Windows didn't exist until '85 or so.  The "world wide web" - what most people would consider the beginning of the 'Net - didn't come along until Berners-Lee invented the concept in '89.. and web browsers weren't in common use until around the mid 90s.

Edited August 16, 2021 by efaardvark

[Animedragon]

Back in the 90's and early 2000's using forums in real time like we do today wasn't really viable on a dial-up connection even with a 56K modem. Back then I was active on Usenet's alt.fan.animation.anime and had a comms program that logged-in grabbed all the new messages since my last visit, downloaded them and disconnected. Then I could read and reply without the meter running. Then when I had finished I hit connect again and program uploaded all my replies.

[efaardvark]

I was more into comp.sci back then but otherwise.. been there, done that as well.  

[Ohayotaku]

@Animedragon @efaardvark sounds like I missed out on a lot of fun  

I don’t think I joined a forum until around 2007 & wasn’t really an active participant until around 2010.

[efaardvark]

25 minutes ago, Ohayotaku said:

@Animedragon @efaardvark sounds like I missed out on a lot of fun  

I don’t think I joined a forum until around 2007 & wasn’t really an active participant until around 2010.

I go all the way back.  Teletype-ASCII BBSs in the pre-ANSI, 300baud dialup modem days.  Then there came the newfangled Fidonet BBSs.  uucp on the unix boxen.  Text-only Dragon's Gate RPG on GEnie at a blazing 2400b (and $6/hr) in the late 80s was my first realtime MMO.  Then telneting into MUDs & MOOs & MUCKs over the pre-WWW Internet.  I even ran my own DIKU-based CircleMUD for a couple years after the 'Net shut GEnie down and Dragon's Gate moved to AOL.

Believe it or not I still log in to IRC occasionally even now.    I do have discord on my phone however. 

As an aside, I believe my early experiences with text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUCKs was good practice for anime and enabled / reinforced a strong preference for subtitles over dubs.  Keeping up with anime subtitles is nothing compared to keeping up with online multiplayer text-based melees at 9600baud. 

[Ohayotaku]

53 minutes ago, efaardvark said:

I go all the way back.  Teletype-ASCII BBSs in the pre-ANSI, 300baud dialup modem days.  Then there came the newfangled Fidonet BBSs.  uucp on the unix boxen.  Text-only Dragon's Gate RPG on GEnie at a blazing 2400b (and $6/hr) in the late 80s was my first realtime MMO.  Then telneting into MUDs & MOOs & MUCKs over the pre-WWW Internet.  I even ran my own DIKU-based CircleMUD for a couple years after the 'Net shut GEnie down and Dragon's Gate moved to AOL.

Believe it or not I still log in to IRC occasionally even now.    I do have discord on my phone however. 

As an aside, I believe my early experiences with text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUCKs was good practice for anime and enabled / reinforced a strong preference for subtitles over dubs.  Keeping up with anime subtitles is nothing compared to keeping up with online multiplayer text-based melees at 9600baud. 

It just goes to show, not much difference in our ages, but a world of difference in our level of tech experience/knowledge  

 

[Animedragon]

6 hours ago, Ohayotaku said:

@Animedragon @efaardvark sounds like I missed out on a lot of fun  

I don’t think I joined a forum until around 2007 & wasn’t really an active participant until around 2010.

alt.fan.animation.anime was a crazy place and a lot of fun with a mix of good natured banter and in-jokes.

4 hours ago, efaardvark said:

I go all the way back.  Teletype-ASCII BBSs in the pre-ANSI, 300baud dialup modem days.  Then there came the newfangled Fidonet BBSs.  uucp on the unix boxen. 

Ah, nostalgia, I remember 300 baud modems and dial-up BBSs. Somewhere in the loft with all sorts of ancient computer bits is my old 300 baud modem.

[s0ftmochi1]

Its really cool ! :D 

[efaardvark]

Was just talking with my brother about the early 'Net days & he sent me this pic....

 

... to say nothing about the GPU-killing hamster dance page, or that bizarre Quiznos commercial.  (Original 'Net meme inspiration? here .. if you dare.  Imagine spending an hour or two downloading that at 56k dialup speeds just to see what the buzz was about.  Maybe some moments are better lost.)  I also remember Yahoo when it was just a collection of symlinks.  

 

[Otaking66lives]

I keep hearing the dial-up tone...aaarrrggghhh!!!

[Animedragon]

On 2/7/2022 at 11:06 PM, Otaking66lives said:

I keep hearing the dial-up tone...aaarrrggghhh!!!

The last place I worked in still had a piece of kit that used a dial-up connection and every time it decided it need to contact the outside world I'd hear those familiar dialling and data negotiation tones. As this was in 2017 everything else in the room that needed external data access was connected to our broadband line I never found out why that one device was still on old tech.

[Deeath]

considering i was born in 2005...i think i'd be considered a youngster, heheh