Loved this, it's something I think about a lot. I "grew up on the internet" and spent a lot of time in my youth making flash games/videos for me and my friends and we always had such a great time. Even today, 20-some years later, a lot of our vernacular from flash videos still finds its way into our speech- "fire ze missles", "badger badger badger SNAKE", that kind of thing.
The bit at the end about "the old ways" still being needed sometimes... it reminds me of a story I saw recently about how we're still researching ancient Roman concrete and finding secrets about why it's so durable (https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...) Makes you wonder how many artistries have been lost over the years, and what kind of stuff we work on today that will be lost in the future. I spend a good 50 hours a week toiling over code, and already I see that changing a lot over the next 10 years. I can't imagine what it will be like in 50.
I love the star wars rap and wee.
"When you're a kid an you wanna go wee but you ain't got drugs yet, you hold on to your life, you hold on to your gonads and strife, gonads and strife x3 , gonads in the lightning in the the lightning in the the rain weee."
"It's not the east or the west side - no it's not, it's not the north or the south side - no its not, it's the dark side - you are correct. So for all you Vader haters we'll blow your planet up. What is thy bidding my master, it's a disaster, Skywalker we're after, but if he could be turned to the dark side, yes, we'd have a powerful ally..."
That was the internet I loved, pre Facebook, pre cookie banners, pre everything bad nowadays. Better times too, everyone knew the Dubyas were full of shit and most people didn't go haywire yet with the gender crap and the 15 years of Islam hate terrorism brainwashing etc.
Work was fun because "SOLID" and OO fetish wasn't there yet, no k8s, no cloud, no microservices. Living was less difficult. And you could actually find things to buy in local stores vs Amazon swallowing everything. You could also say anything without bullshit censorship. Steam was new and didn't have much power. MMORPGs were big and the social networks of that time, besides ICQ which was a falling star but the main platform to send messages, also MSN messenger. I don't want to know the amount of spying that was going on there.
Summers were warm but not the burning hell of today. See you in 20 years and 45-50°C in Northern Europe.
There were forums everywhere, not just that abomination reddit.
Google still had the don't be evil slogan and getting into adsense wasn't impossible like it's nowadays. Layers ads were a thing. No bootstrap meant colorful and diverse websites. And then came Facebook and turned everything into shit.
The bit at the end about "the old ways" still being needed sometimes... it reminds me of a story I saw recently about how we're still researching ancient Roman concrete and finding secrets about why it's so durable (https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...) Makes you wonder how many artistries have been lost over the years, and what kind of stuff we work on today that will be lost in the future. I spend a good 50 hours a week toiling over code, and already I see that changing a lot over the next 10 years. I can't imagine what it will be like in 50.