I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.
Douglas Adams expressed this well:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.
Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.
Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.
It's not just age, it's a sense of loss. I can still go down to the store and buy milk in bag form, just as I could when I was a kid, so I don't feel nostalgic about it even though it's old. I feel nostalgic about the web of my youth because that place is gone now and it'll likely never come back.
In tech circles we like to obsess over new technologies and all of the amazing new possibilities they've brought. We don't spend nearly as much time talking about all we've lost.
Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.
The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed and responsiveness often take a backseat, but improvements do happen. (AMP, CDNs like CloudFlare, use of native apps, etc.)
Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.
Yes, exactly. So while today on a slow connection you can find yourself waiting a long time for Gmail to load up and let you read your email, in the days of 300 baud your email would be downloaded in batch and your mail reader would come up instantly, letting you peruse and read your email at leisure.
I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?
I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.
The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.
Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.
Ok, maybe I was spoiled with 100 Mbps connection at the time but I was mainly talking about Apps. They were not web-based, all written in C, some form of BASIC or Assembler.
Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.
One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.
Douglas Adams expressed this well:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.
Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.