I'm old and jaded.
I've been around awhile and when it comes to the internet I'm talking about the stone age. I remember buying my first dial up modem which connected at the blazing rate of 24k in the eighties. At this time all you could really connect to was lexus/nexus and various online bulletin boards(BBS), everything was text based, there were no websites to speak of, yet it was exciting, a new frontier.
One BBS that captured my imagination was "The Well" short for "The Whole Earth 'lectronic Link" widely considered the first online community. Wow! This was a place where you could join in on conversations with people from around the globe for the first time, the excitement for me can't be downplayed. Even though this was just simple text based interaction it was a giant step forward and a heady experience. Here you could sit in on conversations with people like John Perry Barlow and Brian Eno. It broke down walls and created new outlets, access and facilitated communication like never before. I still get a little nostalgic thinking about it, dialing in from my Tandy computer was always exciting and held the promise of something new, the free flow of information.
Since then I have become fairly jaded about the internet, the well still exists but I don't subscribe or participate. I despise twitter and Facebook but am resigned to them as facts of life now. I find myself struggling to remember what it was like when people looked each other in the eye and actively interacted and communicated in public. I realize there is no going back though and have been encouraged by the development of cryptocurrencies and their potentially revolutionary role in our future.
Because of my interest in cryptocurrency I stumbled on Steemit and I have to say it's the first time I've been excited by anything to do with the internet in a long time. Just as with bitcoin, the concept of steemit took me a while to grok. Now that I get it, I'm excited!
Nice job developers, I think this platform has legs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation
I look forward to seeing more of you. It would be great to hear your stories of the old internet, the people you met, the conversations you had. There's plenty of info out there around the 90s stuff and the tech bubble - but not much around the world of computers before then.
Welcome on board!
Thanks Alex, Glad I found steemit, I personally hope it crushes Facebook in the long run. I really despise the way the way they profit massively from the user base and leave me feeling used and data raped (data rape? that could be a good post title!) yet I'm there because all my friends from around the world are there. The way steemit has rewards participants to me is a similar concept to buying local and keeping dollars within a community and that is a huge revelation to me. When you look at the valuation of facebook I believe you can see where steemit is headed, I'm a true believer. Sky's the limit.
I am from the old BBS days as well - you might be interested to know that BBSing (usually over telnet) is starting to come back in various forms. I run a bbs at bbs.thehomesteadinghippy.com port 34123 - bbs message networks like fidonet and other new ones like fsxnet are gaining popularity again with us computer pioneers. The raspberry pi has become a popular platform to run BBS software on which there are a number that are still in active development such as Mystic BBS. I remember hearing about "The Well" but never connected to it back in the day. Now that it brought it to my attention, I think I will check it out.