Noclip (videogame documentarians) got their hands on a bunch of old tapes with videogame history on them that were going to landfill. This is so cool.

Noclip (videogame documentarians) got their hands on a bunch of old tapes with videogame history on them that were going to landfill. This is so cool.
via The Columbo Phile by Mark Dawidziak
Really good stuff.
GUYS!
FELLOWS!
DON'T YOU KNOW THAT FALK'S THE STAR?!
WE NEED TO SEE HIM FUCKIN!
These are the people that would go on to become the parents of current day braind-dead executives.
When I first got access to the internet, it was through a friend's dial-up shell account that I made him go get after he enrolled at the junior college. I was still in high school, so it was probably 1992 or so. This was before the web existed, so the main services you had were, like...
...and so on. From there the presidents menu might dive down into "famous presidents" and "infamous presidents" or whatever. Eventually you'd read some piece of info and move on.
That's kinda it. None of it was commercialized and the very idea of typing a credit card number into a computer seemed like the worst idea in the world. It wouldn't take long, at that point, for people to start trying to make money off of it one way or another. For one, people started running commercial ISPs and selling subscriptions to shell accounts. The admin of the junior college's dial-up service eventually left and started up sonic.net, which was great because they had the phone/modem capacity to allow more than one person log in at a time.
When I started working at a magazine in 1994, I saw the web on a Mac for the first time and was pretty blown away, but there wasn't much to look at. That live image of the coffee pot was online and that was a real winner. But even then, the commercial opportunities didn't really exist. Companies were starting to get their own .com domains and all that, but no one was really sure what to do with them.
When I started working at a video game website in 1996, the idea of a magazine on the web, something that would actually be commercial in nature and try to make money through advertising, seemed dicey, but they had a sales team and it seemed like it was going OK. Even then, the idea of buying something online seemed weird. I think I might've mailed someone some cash for some video tapes at one point.
Now it kinda feels like the core of the internet is completely falling apart as every major commercial service woke up one morning and said "wait, we can't just run at a loss forever under the guise of building an audience?" And all of those commercial services--Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Google, whatever--are just getting worse all the time. I think there are any number of reasons you could point to here, from people too narrowminded to think about the big picture of their products to just, ya know, capitalism doing what it does.
I don't really have some glossy-eyed optimism here. I think anyone out there peddling some kind of "THIS MEANS THE INTERNET WILL ONCE AGAIN BELONG TO ITS USERS" is just lying to themselves. But it does provide this weird opportunity to figure out what's next and those solutions don't have to be so wrapped up in the archetypes of the recent past. I do think that the solutions probably need to be rooted in figuring out what people actually want to do online, though, rather than just some technology thing that excites some engineer somewhere.
Might have more to say about this later, gotta bring in groceries.