Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.
Kind of fun chart. I am wondering what it would look like in absolute terms. My guess is that everything but newsgroups and possibly ftp would show absolute increases in usage (assuming telnet includes ssh).
Remember old BBS's?
You call up with a dial up modem, only one user at a time could log in. Playing games like Usurper or L.O.R.D?
Good times.
God, I miss MUDS or dialling into my friend's computer to play me a good game of Doom or something. Praise be unto Satan, I miss the old web :(
I remember back in the day I was on an FTP set up where I was a video game reviewer and we had access to a lot of ROMs. Like...a lot. This was back in the GBA days, of course, and we had literally every. single. GBA and Gameboy game hosted on our servers. Probably 90% of all cartridge based games, too. I miss them days.
Finding a new BBS that you'd never visited, filling out their form, uploading something to start your ratio going... I so totally miss that. And the happy squeal of a modem. Sure, it's nice being connected all the time, but there was something so "OK.... and.... YOU'RE IN!" about that handshake. And I miss the terrible ASCII art, too. And the silly names ("Pirate's Lair" or "Crystal Palace" or "Gamerz Zone")
I remember, right before the last nail went into the coffin of BBSs, trying out a new graphical, mouse driven BBS client. Which of course resembled a web browser, but back at a time when BBS clients were all scrolling text and command lines. I wondered, many times, whether whoever invented the graphical client might have climbed into the tub and opened a vein when Netscape made millionaires out of a couple of guys who kind of invented the same thing.
Finding a new BBS that you'd never visited, filling out their form, uploading something to start your ratio going... I so totally miss that. And the happy squeal of a modem. Sure, it's nice being connected all the time, but there was something so "OK.... and.... YOU'RE IN!" about that handshake. And I miss the terrible ASCII art, too. And the silly names ("Pirate's Lair" or "Crystal Palace" or "Gamerz Zone")
Man. That quote was like one of Proust's madeleines for me.
[scribbling note to be placed in bottle, sealed and tossed into the sea]
These may be my last words, am surrounded by nerds, the outlook is bleak but I will try to resist to my last.
