I hope that the net stops fighting over stupid political stuff

October 29, 2016 10:33 AM

"I didn't go online for a long time because of my fears it'd mostly be a bunch of 15-year old technoid geeks and social outcasts. ☯87DEC" Visit the early days of the Internet with @WWWTEXt which posts online conversations from 1980-94
posted by The Whelk (19 comments total)

I used to think it was a terrible place because it was full of technoid geeks and social outcasts (i.e. people like myself).

Then the rest of the world showed up, and I realized how quaint that belief was.
posted by ead at 10:51 AM on October 29, 2016 [11 favorites]

I have a personal friend who is trying to mutate into a frog. Could this be Alex Jones's first internet communication?
posted by Oyéah at 11:26 AM on October 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Only if the friend was mutating while sitting in a boiling pot on a stove.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:28 AM on October 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

The NSA are very good at what they do, which is essentially reading other people's mail. ☯90MAY
posted by gucci mane at 11:37 AM on October 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

☯87DEC

The "☯" symbol was added to Unicode in 1991, and Unicode in itself wasn't widely used at that time. These are clearly all faked.
posted by effbot at 11:58 AM on October 29, 2016

These are clearly all faked.

Either you're joking or you didn't click the link, where it's obvious that for whatever reason the collater is using "☯" to separate the quote from its date of origin.
posted by PMdixon at 12:10 PM on October 29, 2016

I just got a chance to play SimCity! It's like a drawing program that lets you build cities. 89DEC

So many neat quotes. The power of human curation!
posted by comealongpole at 12:10 PM on October 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I am an official Nice Guy and I am also a True Nerd. ☯92JUN

Nah these are cute and pertinent, but fake or pulled from our current intarwebs and posted as if. I was online in 1990 and no one started using capitalized "Nice Guy" until the 2000s.

Another dead giveaway is that there's no "there r no women on teh internet lol". Granted, I'm grateful he went a more inclusive route, but yeah I will never forget that period for the flaming misogyny it burned into my life experience. I was 14 in 1990.
posted by fraula at 12:20 PM on October 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

These are clearly all faked.

The project's website, which is wittily designed as Mac System 7, has a FAQ that claims "Primary sources include: discussion groups on Usenet, BBS-based FidoNet, and the initial online services (CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, AOL); both public and private text files; early hypertexts of Gopher/WWW; and abandoned personal documents."
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:25 PM on October 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Nah these are cute and pertinent, but fake or pulled from our current intarwebs and posted as if. I was online in 1990 and no one started using capitalized "Nice Guy" until the 2000s.

The Nice Guy quote is indeed from 1992.
posted by jedicus at 12:41 PM on October 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

I suspect it's less the modern concept of Nice Guy(TM) and more that ironic/emphatic capitalising is A Thing. One which I do Too Much come to think of it.
posted by comealongpole at 1:26 PM on October 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The newsgroup post discusses "Nice Guy" usage in reference to it in terms of relationships and rejection. Including pointing out some groups use it with an added (tm). So it was a thing. And I remember Nice Guy being a term I've known my adult life, so the time fits. I think what HAS changed is our recognition from the idea that the Nice Guy is just a hapless guy that can't get women, to the more recent understanding that the Nice Guy sees women as objects you insert friendship coins into in return for sex. Basically the idea has shifted that the Nice Guy is not really nice. Or at least there is a wider recognition of such now.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 1:37 PM on October 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

This hapless because you're too nice notion was big enough in the 80's to be used in promoting computer games.
posted by meinvt at 1:48 PM on October 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

The newsgroup post discusses

Wait, what, there's a metafilter feed into USENET?
posted by sammyo at 5:03 PM on October 29, 2016

My sister is a “squid” (an e-mail freak)—she checks it every ten minutes. ☯94APR

Wow! I'd totally forgotten that term, but yeah, some people I used to hang out, we called going online "squidding." I cannot for the life of me remember the etymology, but ... yeah. Awww, those brain cells have been dormant for 20 years and now they can go back to sleep until "squidding" is needed once more.
posted by sldownard at 1:32 AM on October 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

This hapless because you're too nice notion was big enough in the 80's to be used in promoting computer games.

“Nice Guys End Up With Madagascar.”

WELL, I SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
*goes back to playing Pandemic*
posted by lmfsilva at 7:55 AM on October 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

After the year 2000, I believe humanity will break beyond all physical constraints and all logical thought will begin to dissolve. ☯94MAR

Well, part of that turned out to be true.
posted by y2karl at 8:14 AM on October 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

OH MY GOD this is mesmerizing. The first thing to draw my attention from hitting refresh on the election thread in days. The '80s net seems so mythical to me-- like a lost civilization.
posted by Capybara at 4:02 PM on October 30, 2016

re: squid

Does it have anything to do with superconducting quantum interference device? It was A Thing in science fiction to "jack into" the net using a SQUID interface.
posted by porpoise at 3:38 PM on October 31, 2016