Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

In 2016 I voted Trump. In fact before that election I mostly voted republicanish except in some cases.

You have to remember in 2016 that Hillary was deeply unlikeable, and I believe her email scandal should have put her in way more trouble than it actually did. Her platform at the time was that you should vote for her because then she would be the first woman president! The country needed something else.

Hillary was not the answer and it was the DNC’s inability to read the room that lost them the election.

I fucking love Bernie but he wasn’t the right guy either. He sticks to his ideals which is a fantastic quality but doesn’t win general elections, which realistically needs people who are more center aligned.

I regret my Trump vote and will never repeat that mistake but it’s hard to know where we’d be had it been that Hillary shyster.

Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.

No way this isn’t struck down. It’s got to just be a political signaling play.

Now, 100% of books and all media is simplified and accessible to anybody who can get access to this tool

All right all right, I get why this is kind of funny and perhaps it’s potentially a bad sign for humanity.

But consider an adult who’s learning the English language and is still at a basic level. If they want reading practice, they are often stuck with kids books. This would make practice a lot more interesting.

That’s an interesting and somewhat sad point. Economically immigration is probably cheaper for society than raising domestic children properly.

Hypothetically we can scoop the cream from the top of other countries and let them bear the expense of early childhood education, and come out better off than doing it ourselves.

Old guys need to pass the torch for their brands to stay relevant.

It’s a selfish act to be 80 whatever with this much political capital and not have been developing protégés with whom to share and support.

Biden should be on a rocking chair sipping a lemonade for the rest of his life at this point, maybe calling in favors as necessary for a 40 or 50-year-old high energy leader who actually has to live in the future he creates.

I think this was the version right before WYSIWIG support was added. So you could still use fonts, and change font sizes but on screen it would show a strange notation but not the actual font. Complex layouts were tough 😅

This seems like both a feature and a bug with the fediverse. Some topics just fit a lot of subs and then you multiply that by all the Lemmy instances. It seems like the discussions around big topics can really get spread around.

A lot of research has gone into this and for better or worse it works so well that any price not set this way is not getting the best results for the seller.

When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.

There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.

If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.

It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.

Impressive, I don’t think I’d heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.

I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.

All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.

The bible is not univocal. So saying “pick up a bible” to understand his views perhaps includes killing those who wear mixed fabrics and giving women instructions for abortions. Maybe it also includes killing his firstborn son whenever the voices say he should. Or maybe he doesn’t think those parts mean what they say, but other parts do?

It’s Zelenskyy’s job to say that. But if he doesn’t get it he’ll be in a tough situation with his troops assuming he tries to backpedal that and encourage them to keep fighting.

I don’t understand why Europe isn’t more involved in shutting this situation down. It’s your goddamn borders at risk if this smoldering fire isn’t put out.

Money doesn’t matter

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