1996 - The Great Web Wipeout
 

anyone remember reading this classic wired article? April 1996, and the end of the web is nigh :)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4...eout.html?pg=1

"The Spot" - haha, i almost completely forgot about that site. the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yeah I used to read all the old WIRED's... before that magazine got full of so many "It's sooooo fashionable to be a nerd" ads

yep, i agree. i had a subscription till around '98. also used to get the daily wired news email till late '98.

Before WIRED I was all Boardwatch Magazine... That went from a BBS/modem hobby magazine into a magazine about ISP's -- then when the ISP biz consolidated they moved the magazine into hosting...

I remember when you could choose from like 13 modems 2400 modems... I had a Hayes, a couple of USR HST C's, something with MNP 5... and I had a 2400 with a v.42bis...

I was multitasking before anyone... I had betas of DESQView and the first preemp ever on a PC -- OS/2 1.0... First preemp ever of DOS windows OS/2 2.0... DESQView was hot but it didn't have a graphic interface... Then OS/2 fucked up because of poor marketing and a boring interface -- Gates was smart to target the home... IBM was still stuck thinking of "business" as the target audience... I'm sure OS/2 is still running some really heavy powered stuff even today -- mission critical stuff -- but who really knows... OS/2 officially died when I was working for them... I saw their last stitch effort -- it was like watching a burning ship sink slowly over two weeks they worked on the kernal insane hours -- they had their best people working on it... but it was pointless from beginning -- OS/2 was just boring and gray. I asked them why it was so boring -- they told me it was because they did a study on workplace environment and found that gray was the most pleasant and easy on the eyes...

you 2 should just talk on the phone, lol

i think wont be more than a couple ppl that remember any of the stuff you do, heh

Shit I was just a kid then -- even before the PC came out I had memories of my dad showing me a star-trek game with the old

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Warp engines... Remember that shit?! Only this wasn't even on a PC -- it was on a big ass fucking fridge sized computer...

best thing about the article is that it was printed in issue 4.04.

you in Medicine Hat?

"It takes time." How tru...

Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, only half-jokingly, at a recent raucous shareholder meeting. "Gangsta rap-yes. World Wide Web-no."


Poor Tupac -- modern day Gladiator:(

another classic. this article really got me stoked at the time:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/sex.html?pg=1

Haha, the memories. I remember DESQView; hell, I liked it so much that I worked for Quarterdeck for 5 years. All us hardcore BBSers used it... chaining 64 physical modems to one hardware interrupt... insane bastards :thumbsup

OS/2... I never used it. I respected the technology, but IBM never understood the kernal's consumer power (MS did with NT 3.something, as it used the exact same kernal). Hell, IBM taught MS more about secure application layers than they've ever been able to learn on their own... to this day, all recently released MS OS's (2k and XP) use essentially the same early 1990's kernal that OS/2 and early NT used.

Damn, I'm a geek :1orglaugh

Good piece of history. I wish I was old enough back then though to get some shit going on the web, but I think I was too busy trading warez on aol ...I think I was 16. :-)

Interesting numbers:

Then (1996):
Playboy, for example, expects to sign up more than 5 million Web subscribers worldwide by June 1997,...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4...ml?pg=2&topic=

Now (2003):
The (Playboy) site provides its more than 95,000 members worldwide with exclusive, insider access to unique Playboy-branded content.

http://www.playboyenterprises.com/fact_sheet/

i bet the people running playboy's online unit in 97 are working somewhere else now