IN MY DAY, IF YOU WANTED TO WIN A NERD FIGHT YOU HAD TO GO TO A PUBLIC LIBRARY AND CHECK OUT A BOOK FOR PROOF

@AppleDash
Me too.

@Ebalosus
I hate the way things are these days, I hate it so much… I started using the Internet at a fairly young age, and at the end of that era, and these days I spend every day hating it more and more and wishing I could have been born just a decade earlier to live my 20s/30s in that time.

They don’t, because the likes of Alta Vista, Usenet, BBS, The Eternal September, and totse are completely alien concepts to them. They’re vaguely aware of dialup due to the sounds the modems used to make sticking around in popular culture, but have no concept of how that shaped how we used the internet and what could be found on it. I work in a computer/phone repair shop, and occasionally a young person will ask me after I’ve replaced their iPhone screen something like “what did people use before Youtube/Tiktok/Facebook/Instagram/etc?” I’ll usually answer with either earlier iterations of those ideas, which they’ll be surprised that there was social media websites before even MySpace, or video sharing websites before Youtube; and will stare at me blankly when I bring up ftp servers, warez, Kazaa, BBS websites, and oldschool internet forums. They cannot conceive of a time when the internet we have now wasn’t like it is, which both makes me feel old, and says terrible things about the sclerotic current state of the internet.