I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover).

I might write again from time to time...

Thanks for mentioning it!

PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.

It was a unique time back in the late 90s, and those guys had their finger on the pulse of internet nerdom. It was pre-Facebook, pre-"Web 2.0" pre a lot of things. In a lot of ways Slashdot was the spiritual predecessor to Hacker News, so we owe that crew a debt.

I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!

IIRC they recorded sporadically around 1999 and 2000, just talking about whatever had been on the front page recently. I've thought about doing a sort of retrospective, listening to each one and writing a blog post about what they found interesting... it's a neat peek back at a different time and a different culture.

People still have interest in philosophy, free Internet and so forth.

Nothing is gone, it's just been made a bit less obvious.

I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules.

They were never bad people to be around.

(used 'The Alchemist' as a username - probably because I was into reading about it at the time. Unfortunately most people probably thought I liked that book of the same name).

I went to a meetup in Melbourne. Met a girl in Chicago. Discovered that someone else lived literally on my street, a third of a mile away. I had several small world experiences on E2.

The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing.

Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).

Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more nurturing of creativity.

I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today.

It was a neat time to live in, for sure.

You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.

It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use.

The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan...

It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?

Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written.

[0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...

The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

> The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

> Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one).

Now everything is so easy...

For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details.

And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs.

In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.

I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!

Feels old, man.

Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420, but I understand why that's not exactly a priority.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332

In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.

VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient.

I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset some LTGC.

I purchased some wisdom with that experience.

Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266

(I must be really boring at parties.)

That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)

It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was available.

I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.

kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible archive of.

That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was worth even a penny.

I've since wondered who made that first article talking about bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I only have my own memories to go on.

Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and realized you were already well into the eternal September by that stage!

(I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see CPU and operating system and other software designers from different organizations debating everything from kernels to TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under their real names.)

"Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz...

by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)

And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart.

Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

i can’t tell you how much valinux changed my life.

the excitement. the possibilities. the dotcom money.

most of all the people - like rasterman, octobrx, rasmus of php fame.

insane coalescence of talent.

working there part time on linux.com was such a foundation experience for me as a freshman in college.

i feel like an old hippie now too.

but forever greatful to LNUX

I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.

thanks for the fun memories. :)

Those Bubble 1.0 adverts were the best.

Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast

Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.

So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !