I really enjoyed this retrospective of Suck.com, not because I every really loved Suck, but because it reminds me of what I sometimes forget — that I didn’t just witness the birth of the web, I helped cut the umbilical cord.
I’d forgotten that I used to read Wired on Gopher. I’d forgotten what a big deal that the HotWired launch was. I forgot that we thought it was the end of the WWW (as we called it) when HotWired required registration with their “Login or Join” page. I’d forgotten how ardently I was opposed to the WWW in 1993, when Mosaic came out, telling anybody who would listen that images only wasted precious bandwidth, and would really serve no purpose, anyhow.
For anybody old enough to know better, riding the internet bubble up in the ’90s would have been a weird and wonderful trip. I was young enough, though (15 in 1993) that I didn’t know better. I had no sense of scale, no frame of reference to appreciate that this isn’t how businesses are supposed to work or that this changes everything.
It wasn’t, of course, how businesses are supposed to work, but it did change everything. It didn’t change everything for me (or my generation), though — this is just how it is.
Whipper-snapper. Back in the day I was reading email on FIDO-net and sleuthing around the BBS networks. Then this damn Internet thing came along and made everybody a geek. ;)
I’m kiddin’ around about the last point, but I empathize with you. I remember trying to hold back a wall of spam on usenet and slowly watched online spaces become corporatized. Around 2000 I nearly conceded that the Internet had been taken over by monied interests, but between the dot-com crash and the emergence of weblogs I’ve regained some confidence online spaces.
Hey, I was running a FIDONet node on my C’ville BBS. My e-mail address was 1:3603/998. :)
Wow. I’m not sure if I should be more impressed that you ran a FODONet node or that you remember your email address. (bows down) I’m not worthy!