I'm Miguel, 50, my first computer was a lovely Amstrad CPC 464 which I got for Christmas with a green monitor. I loved everything of it except loading games from cassettes. Nothing like spending a literal 15 minutes to get a game to load only to hear your mother telling you to stop playing. It made you feel in control, those kind of computers. The manual taught you the basics you needed to do whatever you wanted from it. But we had no access to the Internet or anything remotely like that. My first experience was at college on terminal linked to a 286 computer running Xenix. That beast had a 20 MB HD serving 7 students at the same time. Then, some time in the 90's I found the Web, which was the place to know about stuff you could not access anywhere else and meet very interesting people. (I remember once asking something about killer whales and had a researcher answering it to me). At some point people saw they could use the web as a dollar cow, and it some senses it all went downhill. I'm not in Gopher and Gemini for any nostalgia. I never experienced Gopher until last december, and Gemini just a week later. Not too long afterward I joined cosmic.voyage (a tilde hosted by our local hero Stephan B.) However, I still keep a presence on the Web, because for some kind of content there's no better alternative, really. In my case, I'm writing gamebooks, and some of them benefit from a little typography and a dash of JS, even if it's only to simulate a dice roll. That all said, I have this hintch that Gemini and Gopher are protocols for the kind and the enterprising. Now, if we only had Gopher back in the 80's
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