I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.
I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.
Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]
And imagine if telecom had topped out around ISDN somewhere, with perhaps OC-3 (155Mbps) for the bleeding-fastest network core links.
We'd probably get MP3 but not video to any great or compelling degree. Mostly-text web, perhaps more gopher-like. Client-side stuff would have to be very compact, I wonder if NAPLPS would've taken off.
Screen reader software would probably love that timeline.
you are wrong. Windows 3.11 era used CPUs with like 33mhz cpu, and yet we had TONS of graphical applications. Including web browsers, Photoshop, CAD, Excel and instant messangers
Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
I don't see how this contradicts any of what they said, unless they've edited their comment.
You're right we had graphical apps, but we did also have very little video. CuSeeMe existed - video conferencing would've still been a thing, but with limited resolution due to bandwidth constraints. Video in general was an awful low res mess and would have remained so if most people were limited to ISDN speeds.
While there were still images on the web, the amount of graphical flourishes were still heavily bandwidth limited.
The bandwidth limit they proposed would be a big deal even if CPU speeds continued to increase (it could only mitigate so much with better compression).
> Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
JavaScript is innocent. The people writing humongous apps with it are the ones to blame. And memory footprint. A 16 MB machine wouldn’t be able to hold the icons an average web app uses today.
Netscape was talking about making the Web an app platform to replace Microsoft Windows even way back then. The world we're living in today is exactly what they envisioned.
Which is funny, because HTML, Java, and JavaScript were being talked about as an app platform a few years before then, precisely to prevent Microsoft from drinking everybody's milkshake on the desktop.
Right, but point is, assume the "backbone" never got fast enough to have a million subscribers all doing that at once.
I remember a subscriber T1 costing 4 figures per month, and I don't think it's because the copper pairs themselves were any different. (They weren't. As long as they didn't have bridge-taps, it was just plain old pairs. The repeaters every few kilofeet were not that expensive either.)
I remember the early-90s internet guidance that idle traffic like keepalive pings was discouraged, especially if you were sending traffic overseas, because it cluttered up the backbone links with packets that weren't actually valuable, and that was rude / abusive. Presumably edge CDNs would've still happened (or, ISPs providing Usenet servers basically did a lot of that already), but you simply wouldn't be doing video over the internet at large because the bandwidth charges would kill you.
You would still have video happening, but it would not be the type we have today (streaming arbitrary full-length movies from a nearly infinite catalog and YouTube). It would be used for big events and things like that. We might still have gotten podcasting, though.
As always, motivated minors will trivially bypass things.
Only annoyed adults, who don't see the point in pursuing a bypass, will supply their actual ID, which is what will eventually get breached in the inevitable yet-another-breach.
> being able to join many communities from a single login.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
....it's available in the Western hemisphere now?! The page mentions Mexico!
I've been wanting to play with Toosheh for YEARS since I first heard about it, but I understood that it was only carried on a bird in the mideast! When did that change?
And simultaneously gimped the theft-alert use case. I embedded one into my labelmaker, which is a notoriously high-theft item on jobsites. I can still track it in case I leave it behind, which is great.
But if someone steals it, they get an alert that there's an airtag traveling with them, and they can go through their loot to figure out which item it is, and ditch it, or destroy it. In the first case I get my labelmaker back, but I never bust the thief.
Please do! Ephemera like that can tell more sides of the story that didn't make it into the book, for whatever reason.
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