wget http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/welcomes/brokrose.ans &&
ansilove -R2 brokrose.ans
It looks like it was more a 1990s thing -- I don't think I'd seen ANSI art in the 1980s -- but it extended to the 1980s.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I was totally into the that art scene! lmao I'd even print that shit out on my dot-matrix printer!
I think you have a few rose lenses between you and your memories. There was a reason why FidoNet, say, had a bunch of nicknames like "FIght-o-Net" back then. The things people argued about weren't all that different from now.
Hmmm, maybe. But I don't remember it being nearly as prominent right now. Here on Lemmy, post a picture of a cute dog and prepare for replies with variations of, "Yeah, well now that Trump is president, get used to not being able to afford a dog!" or "Wow, look at that. I'll never be able to afford a house now. Since fascists voted in a dictator. The closest I'll get to a dog is having to eat dog food because it's all I can afford on my way to the deathcamps!"
Ugh, it just EVERYWHERE now. Also back then it seemed to be smarter people arguing because the cost of admission was higher to get into the computer world--both in intelligence and money.
But to your point, I wasn't THAT smart or rich, so I guess I was never in the hardcore argument worlds. I was reading BASIC magazine and trying to write cool programs that showed colored lines. BBS was more of "OMG I am talking to someone in another state without using the mail!" lolol
I grew up in rural NM and was in elementary school in the early 80s. My school was not much, multiple years I had more than one grade in my classroom. We had a total of about 60 students on a high year. But we had a very progressive principal who applied for every computer grant he could. We had a Tandy computer in every classroom, complete with tape drive, and a wall of computers in the library, including two that had dual 5.25” floppy drives.
Shortly after that I convinced my parents to buy a computer, I was 8 or 9. I wanted an Apple, but because of the larger variety of programs and games available for the IBM clone we went that route.
In 88 or 89 I skipped school with a friend and we ended up at the university in town and someone got us onto the internet and playing an Amber MUD. By high school I had dial up internet and have been online since. I am still in touch with some of the people I met back then, I married one of them.
I miss when people would balk at the idea of email and the internet in general.
Yep! I remember seeing an ad in Omni magazine that showed someone sitting at a computer. And in big bold print it said, "Imagine being able to read the news with just a few clicks of a keyboard!" Then going on to say someday that may happen.
And boy did it ever. But what's so funny that ad seemed so futuristic and cool. Now we do it from our pocket. Crazy.
I still have that magazine by the way. I should dig it out and scan that ad!
I am maybe misplaced in this conversation. I was born in 1990. I do feel a deep nostalgia for early chat rooms and IRC. So much so that I'm trying to build up a chat platform of my own.
In comparison to the time of asking people their A/S/L and just hanging out talking about how our lives are different, there are now maybe four (or five?) categories of potentially society-ending threats hanging around our cultural zeitgeist. All of them addressable, but it just hangs around every internet thread like a miasma now.
But I do think we'll find ourselves nostalgic for this time in a similar way that we look back on the 80's. In the same way it became possible in the mid 70's to just buy some off-the-shelf components and assemble them into personal computers that can be sold en masse, it is every year more and more possible for a relative novice (such as myself) to do something like create their own chat room app. With some prior experience and the help of AI, I've got the bare bones of a shift-left style DevSecOps stack, and it feels really exciting. It feels like I'm a guy in the 70's in his garage putting a prototype personal computer together, the way you can abstract your requirements from deployed resources in CI/CD. I envision a near future where corporate capitalistic social media becomes stale and increasingly awful (status quo) and the average consumer can have an idea for an app and have a fully hardened back end system to support it in the span of an afternoon. I'm looking forward to a new crop of communication technologies that we collectively develop as a people to tackle the overarching issues which affect us all. Imagine if we could all organize to efficiently locate ideal candidates for public office and democratically work out our differences in environments where peaceful debate and separate chill zones are both encouraged, rather than profit-driven systems where outrage is king. We can do so much better, and we are just now on the cusp of having all the tools to enable the average person to finally be able to help themselves.
I'm sorry for the tangent, and for polluting this thread with all of this. I know it's not really on topic, I'm just waiting for tests to process and really pumped up about starting a revolution later, idk, maybe, I mean, like only if you feel like revolting.
A/S/L
I legit got laid doing that in aol chatrooms. One girl I ended up dating for 4 years. Met her in aol chat room. Started with a/s/l. Met her at the food court in the mall. Kissed her at her car. She moved in with me a month later.
Good times. I ended up being clever as fuck in chat. Thankfully women like humor and wit more than looks. It's the only reason I got laid then and the only reason I get laid now. haha
I was just a kid but I did learn about computers in the late 80s. I remember a programming course in the summer that left an impression, though I foolishly never pursued it further.
What I miss most is the wonder. The fascination has mostly all evaporated. Turns out putting a computer in your pocket that your life relies heavily on takes some of the fun away from learning.
I'm trying to recapture it these days by switching to Linux across all my devices and building RasPi projects.
Should have held onto that Lisa II. Probably in a landfill somewhere now, but if I'd known...
I remember a programming course in the summer that left an impression, though I foolishly never pursued it further.
Yep, even tho I do ok and I'm retired, I definitely wish that I had kept pursing it. I actually enjoyed programming in my BASIC class in school. But for some reason, it just never clicked with me that I could do it as a job.
I would be way wealthier if I had pursued it. I have no excuse. It literally just never occurred to me that I could do it as a job.
I grew up in a very rural town, population less that 2,000 people.
Now that I retired early and collect a pension, I am looking to pick up where I left off. Just for fun. :)
Trying to install linux on my PC today as a matter of fact.
80's were fun but I was born in 73. I miss a lot about those days, mostly being young and having few responsibilities and a lot of privileges. The very late 80's and early 90's were the heyday of computing and internet for me. It was the Wild West and everyone in it was mostly young and nerdy. My people.
Now the internet is full of assholes who aren't just autistic, but are self-aware assholes who profit from it in terms of money or attention. If I could turn back time I'd go back to it in a heartbeat.
But it wasn't perfect. CP was everywhere. It hit different when I was 15 myself, but these days I'm glad it's cleaned up. Everything took forever. You could spend hours downloading a thing and it wouldn't work. There were known hacks to bring down chat rooms any time you wanted and assholes would use them. I miss it, though, warts and all. Those were all the things that kept the normies off of it, which I think kept it a better place. Smaller communities with curious people are much better. Which is why I'm here instead of Reddit. When Reddit finally dies, if everyone comes here I bet Lemmy will be pretty miserable, too. It's the people. Not everyone belongs in the online society.
Now the internet is full of assholes who aren’t just autistic, but are self-aware assholes who profit from it in terms of money or attention.
100 percent. I was born in 1969. For me the best decade was the 90's. But I had a lot of fun in the 80's too.
I'm not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.
Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.
And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you're right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the "right" computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.
(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it's still pretty great.)
Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don't know if that's just physics being a pain or if it's straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.
Anyway I'll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.
Yeah, the tech we have is nicer, slicker, and faster. Most just works until it doesn't, then buy another. But I keep feeling like I SHOULD be excited, but I'm not.
I legit and thinking of dialing it all back, going old school and just fucking around w an old computer that can hardly do anything cool.
I mean, that excitement almost came back with raspberry pi, but not it's pretty commercial. AI sort had that thrill, but now it's so good and so fast, the newness wore off.
I recently retired (early retirement), and thought what all my free time I was gonna do and learn all the latest tech. Um, no. Now I want to do old tech as the hobby. lmao
I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.
I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.
Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There's also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.
It's not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it's still reasonable if you have an era you're after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don't, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.
....stop looking at me like that.
There's also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that's a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement, Necroware)
Yeah, I can definitely see myself going down the same path as you. lol