october 16 gui

When people tell me they miss the "old internet," I ask them what they miss in particular, because, like, I'm an internet person, and I know what we lost because I was there, back in in the day, knee deep in the culture. I was messing around on bulletin board systems in like, 1991. Microserfs has been my favourite book since 1995. I eagerly awaited the existence of products and services and technologies I ended up using in the mid and late nineties because growing up I had such a clear (and, as it turns out, accurate) view of what the internet was going to be, look, and feel like. I read books and articles about the future, and then I watched as humans people built it. It was exhilarating. And it turns out that when a lot of people talk about the "old internet," they're not talking about that period. They're talking about, like, Facebook in 2009. Don't get me wrong, I also think Facebook was better in 2009 than it is now, or than I think it is now —— I deleted my account a few years…