💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~sumpygump › gemlog › 2020-08-25-hello.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:10:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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25 August 2020
In the early 1990s, my brother and I would spend a fair amount of time connected to BBSes (bulletin board systems). I recall pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them with various phone numbers and names of particular BBS locations that we though were cool. We would spend hours downloading images of ferraris and motorcycles, in VGA graphics which looked so good, we thought. When I say hours, I mean like three hours just to download one image file on our 2400 baud modem.
Fast forward 30 years and the crazy pace with which technology and software on the internet grows has seemed to continuously increase year over year. Now it is possible (and expected to be able) to stream 1080p video in real time. My 12 year-old mind would not have thought it was possible. There was something cozy and real about sitting there in the early hours of the morning, (our parents didn't like us tying up the phone line during the day time so we would wake up at 3am to log on), reading the messages and checking if there were any cool files to download. There was something simple and pleasant about the frontier of the internet back then.
I am grateful for the pioneers in technology and all those who came before upon whose shoulders we stand who allowed what we have today to be possible. I am glad there are nifty things still being dreamed up today that allow one to hack, tinker and probe with curious wonder. With all the explosion of faster speeds, increasing tech stacks, came a lot of applications for productivity and business and commerce, and ads and other stuff that makes it feel like I am drowning at times. There is a heavy, faceless coldness to it, and I find myself craving simplicity and heart. This gemini protocol seems to be to breathe a life back into the roots of what I remember the internet to be back in the beginning. Technology by people for people.