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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes
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.
Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P
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.
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.
- XMPP Chat
- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)
Then let's game!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)