Do you think things were better before (circa the turn of the millennia)?

[kelvinhall05]

30 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

The politics discussion was just an exemple (it was recently a big issue because we went from letting that pass in status updates to a complete forum wide ban). I just find the reply I quote was quite ironic in it's language (maybe it's wasn't presented properly, or maybe I didn't interpreted it as the poster meant). Still, complaining that you have to walk on eggshells because of snowflakes and SWJ shows the member has opinions that aren't popular, and somehow blames others for it.

 

I have controversial opinions on stuff, I know it can cause issues in discussions, I don't bring it up unless it's relevant, and I certainly don't put the fault of it on others when I do bring it up and have to argue my point.

Clearly you're just a bad mod and against free speech when you delete homophobic bullshit comments, smh

[Mooshi]

Pros of the 90s: 

+ Hand drawn animation vs flash

+ Console wars were actually interesting

+ 8 year olds didn't have iPhones

+ WWF attitude era

+ No social media breeding toxicity

+ Games didn't have achievements for simply playing it

+ TSA booty pirates didn't exist

+ People weren't overly sensitive

+ No simping over Onlyfans etc.

 

Cons:

- No internet for you if someone wanted to use the phone

- Took forever to load anything

- Giant af inconvenient maps thay folded over x100000 times

- PC tech was horribly expensive

- Had to actually call people if you wanted to order food (pizza and Chinese only)

- Uber/Lyft didn't exist to put cabs in their place

 

Just what comes to mind.

[Lord Szechenyi]

42 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I think that until smartphones were popular the Internet was much better,

The excitement from chats,MSN Messenger,Blogs were nice,tumblr,flickr my space were the social media back then.

The best thing was that social media was not monopolized and manipulated like it is today,no tracking or spyware,no micro transactions in games,

and Windows was actually good.

It started to die in 2010~2011 - I mean how many people surfed facebook and had smartphones in 2009? - not many.

YES YES YES AND YES!

[Lord Szechenyi]

30 minutes ago, Mooshi said:

Cons:

- Took forever to load anything

Still does

Quote

Had to actually call people if you wanted to order food (pizza and Chinese only)

How is that a problem?

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Uber/Lyft didn't exist to put cabs in their place

So just take a walk?

Or use public transports?

[Mooshi]

35 minutes ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

Still does

How is that a problem?

So just take a walk?

Or use public transports?

Doesn't sound like you ever experienced dialup before. 1-3mbps would have been considered ungodly fast.

 

Calling adds unnecessary pressure if you're undecisive. Using an app spares someone from that.

 

Yes, walk to places like an airport. Public transportation doesn't go everywhere.

[PlayStation 2]

I dunno. I wasn't alive to experience the 80s and the 90s, but I was alive to experience the remnants of it and the first things to come out of the new millennium (DSL, early infotainments in cars, etc.). Needless to say, there's a lot of good that's come out of the modern age... but at the same time, it does seem like some things have gotten worse, predominately with political manners which I won't go into because I know I'll just get called a Nazi for it. 

 

I will say this: cars have gotten more reliable since the 70s and 80s. You'd be hard fucking pressed to find a 70s car that didn't feel exhausted after going 100k miles. My car's got 180k and it still feels relatively solid.

[WkdPaul]

8 minutes ago, Mooshi said:

Doesn't sound like you ever experienced dialup before. 1-3mbps would have been considered ungodly fast.

People complaining about broadband speeds will never understand dialup speeds.

 

I remember upgrading my modem to a 56k one ... I don't think people now understand how slow that is.

 

[Guest]

Year 1 was the best because the originals are always better. 

[Lord Szechenyi]

2 hours ago, Mooshi said:

Doesn't sound like you ever experienced dialup before. 1-3mbps would have been considered ungodly fast.

 

Calling adds unnecessary pressure if you're undecisive. Using an app spares someone from that.

 

Yes, walk to places like an airport. Public transportation doesn't go everywhere.

"Ungodly fast" is a bit of an exageration, but yes it was considered very good/top tier.

but then again back then you didn't much broadband to load stuff like spacejam.com

 

Well then don't be undecisive and look at what you will purchase before you order!

 

Why would you need to go to an airport? Also, public transports DO go to airports.

[Lord Szechenyi]

2 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

People complaining about broadband speeds will never understand dialup speeds.

 

I remember upgrading my modem to a 56k one ... I don't think people now understand how slow that is.

 

 

While i didn't hear this sound specifically, i remember these crunchy, irritating sounds.

[dalekphalm]

18 hours ago, Mooshi said:

Doesn't sound like you ever experienced dialup before. 1-3mbps would have been considered ungodly fast.

Agreed - I remember when we first upgraded to broadband, and it was DSL around 2 Mbps (this was circa 2001). Yes, it's god-tier compared to Dial-up.

18 hours ago, Mooshi said:

Calling adds unnecessary pressure if you're undecisive. Using an app spares someone from that.

To add to this - it's also massively more convenient to order takeout via a well designed web order mechanism, compared to calling them and talking to them in person.

 

Not just more convenient for the end user, but also for the restaurant. Consider that when you call a Pizza joint, someone has to stop doing whatever it was they were doing (making pizzas) and take your order. This not only slows down the order they're currently working on, but your order too.

 

It also makes it far easier to customize the pizza exactly the way you want, with exactly the toppings you want, and even easily do things like add extra sauce, or cook the pizza well done, etc.

 

Then, on top of that, you can even track the order progress, from them building the pizza, to the cook stage, to out for delivery etc - and some pizza joints even have GPS tracking for the delivery.

 

Online ordering has been nothing but good for takeout restaurants. The social aspect is simply a side benefit (eg: my fiancée hates talking on the phone with strangers, and hates ordering food over the phone).

18 hours ago, Mooshi said:

Yes, walk to places like an airport. Public transportation doesn't go everywhere.

That's an interesting (and odd) point. Some cities have public transit to the airport, but not every city.

 

My city, for example, as a small-ish International Airport, but it's obviously out in the boonies away from town, and there is literally no bus or public transit to that location.

 

And as you said, public transportation doesn't go everywhere. Plus there are plenty of situations where they're not practical. For example, if you're a single parent of 4 kids and you need to go grocery shopping... good luck carrying all that stuff home from the store on a bus.

15 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

"Ungodly fast" is a bit of an exageration, but yes it was considered very good/top tier.

No. It's not. This is one of those examples of you talking about something you haven't experienced.

 

I grew up in the 80's and 90's. I had Dial-up internet until like 2001.

 

56K modems were literally connecting at 56 Kilobits per second. To make this easier to understand, that's a 7 Kilobytes per second download speed. And of course, that's the theoretical top speed. Realistically you never got that speed. Having downloads run at 3-4 KB/s was common.

 

By comparison, a 2 Mbps connection can download at speeds of 250 KB/s.

 

THAT'S LITERALLY 35 TIMES FASTER.

 

Shitty, slow, 1-2 Mbps broadband, was ungodly fast compared to Dial-up. Period. Anyone who says otherwise has simply never experienced literally watching a website render, line by line in real time.

15 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

but then again back then you didn't much broadband to load stuff like spacejam.com

Even shitty 90's websites were slow to load. Literally a website with nothing but text and maybe a few simple graphics could literally take minutes or longer to load. If it had any images, each image would take minutes to load on it's own, and that's assuming a shitty low resolution image.

15 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

Well then don't be undecisive and look at what you will purchase before you order!

And you can do that, incredibly easily, with online ordering. There's literally no downside to online ordering.

15 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

Why would you need to go to an airport?

This feels like a question devised by someone who isn't an adult, and doesn't need to do adult-y things. Sometimes you need to go to the airport. The reason will vary. Perhaps you're... I don't know, getting on a plane? Maybe you're picking up your aunt or girlfriend or husband from the airport?

15 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

Also, public transports DO go to airports.

Some. This largely depends on where you live.

[Lord Szechenyi]

7 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Agreed - I remember when we first upgraded to broadband, and it was DSL around 2 Mbps (this was circa 2001). Yes, it's god-tier compared to Dial-up.

To add to this - it's also massively more convenient to order takeout via a well designed web order mechanism, compared to calling them and talking to them in person.

 

Not just more convenient for the end user, but also for the restaurant. Consider that when you call a Pizza joint, someone has to stop doing whatever it was they were doing (making pizzas) and take your order. This not only slows down the order they're currently working on, but your order too.

 

It also makes it far easier to customize the pizza exactly the way you want, with exactly the toppings you want, and even easily do things like add extra sauce, or cook the pizza well done, etc.

 

Then, on top of that, you can even track the order progress, from them building the pizza, to the cook stage, to out for delivery etc - and some pizza joints even have GPS tracking for the delivery.

 

Online ordering has been nothing but good for takeout restaurants. The social aspect is simply a side benefit (eg: my fiancée hates talking on the phone with strangers, and hates ordering food over the phone).

That's an interesting (and odd) point. Some cities have public transit to the airport, but not every city.

 

My city, for example, as a small-ish International Airport, but it's obviously out in the boonies away from town, and there is literally no bus or public transit to that location.

 

And as you said, public transportation doesn't go everywhere. Plus there are plenty of situations where they're not practical. For example, if you're a single parent of 4 kids and you need to go grocery shopping... good luck carrying all that stuff home from the store on a bus.

No. It's not. This is one of those examples of you talking about something you haven't experienced.

 

I grew up in the 80's and 90's. I had Dial-up internet until like 2001.

 

56K modems were literally connecting at 56 Kilobits per second. To make this easier to understand, that's a 7 Kilobytes per second download speed. And of course, that's the theoretical top speed. Realistically you never got that speed. Having downloads run at 3-4 KB/s was common.

 

By comparison, a 2 Mbps connection can download at speeds of 250 KB/s.

 

THAT'S LITERALLY 35 TIMES FASTER.

 

Shitty, slow, 1-2 Mbps broadband, was ungodly fast compared to Dial-up. Period. Anyone who says otherwise has simply never experienced literally watching a website render, line by line in real time.

Even shitty 90's websites were slow to load. Literally a website with nothing but text and maybe a few simple graphics could literally take minutes or longer to load. If it had any images, each image would take minutes to load on it's own, and that's assuming a shitty low resolution image.

And you can do that, incredibly easily, with online ordering. There's literally no downside to online ordering.

This feels like a question devised by someone who isn't an adult, and doesn't need to do adult-y things. Sometimes you need to go to the airport. The reason will vary. Perhaps you're... I don't know, getting on a plane? Maybe you're picking up your aunt or girlfriend or husband from the airport?

Some. This largely depends on where you live.

i have 4mpbs (or most days only 2)

if you have fiber then 100mbps is easily purchasable.

that's 50times faster and its cheap.

Also, we upgraded to adsl in 2010 so i can say that yes, dial up to adsl it's a big difference, watching websites load in lines is something i was very used to.

i didn't say there was a downside to ordering online, i said there is no downside in ordering back then.

well we have only one (major, as in public) airport and public transport goes there.

All of my family lives in my country, and i'm not looking to move to another country, so no i see no reason at all to use an airplane

[WkdPaul]

7 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Period. Anyone who says otherwise has simply never experienced literally watching a website render, line by line in real time.

Exactly !!!!

 

There was nothing else back then, so it was totally normal towait.

 

To have an internet connection so fast that you didn't have to wait for a webpage to load back then WAS ungodly fast, quite incredible at the time. It would be the equivalent to have a 25/10 ADSL connection, and then going to a synchronous 1Gbps connection ; no video / media buffering.

[Lord Szechenyi]

1 minute ago, wkdpaul said:

Exactly !!!!

 

There was nothing else back then, so it was totally normal towait.

 

To have an internet connection so fast that you didn't have to wait for a webpage to load back then WAS ungodly fast, quite incredible at the time. It would be the equivalent to have a 25/10 ADSL connection, and then going to a synchronous 1Gbps connection ; no video / media buffering.

 

15 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

(too much text)

you both never used Minitel.

But then again it wasn't meant to load websites

[WkdPaul]

5 minutes ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

 

you both never used Minitel.

But then again it wasn't meant to load websites

Not sure how is has any bearing with the current discussion.

 

I have used 8086 PCs and up, never got anything older than that. I think the slowest connection I ever used was on a 386 with a 14.4k modem ... damn I'm old !

 

As for the Minitel, I'm from Canada and grew up in the 80's, Minitel was in France in the 80's. So it was the right years, not the right place though, so not something I could've epxerienced.

[Commodus]

45 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Not sure how is has any bearing with the current discussion.

 

I have used 8086 PCs and up, never got anything older than that. I think the slowest connection I ever used was on a 386 with a 14.4k modem ... damn I'm old !

 

As for the Minitel, I'm from Canada and grew up in the 80's, Minitel was in France in the 80's. So it was the right years, not the right place though, so not something I could've epxerienced.

I may have you beat. When I was a kid and we first got any kind of connectivity at home, I was connecting to BBSes on a 286 with a 9600 baud modem. Sometimes it connected below 9600 speeds. It was fine when the most you'd do was play a BBS game, but suffice it to say we upgraded modems as soon as possible even before we had home internet.

[Wheresmehammer]

I have you all beat, we had no internet.

[Lord Szechenyi]

1 hour ago, wkdpaul said:

Not sure how is has any bearing with the current discussion.

 

I have used 8086 PCs and up, never got anything older than that. I think the slowest connection I ever used was on a 386 with a 14.4k modem ... damn I'm old !

 

As for the Minitel, I'm from Canada and grew up in the 80's, Minitel was in France in the 80's. So it was the right years, not the right place though, so not something I could've epxerienced.

14.4k

Minitel was less than 2k

i would compare to Teletext (uk)  but as far as i know it was more than that.

[Blade of Grass]

1 hour ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

i didn't say there was a downside to ordering online, i said there is no downside in ordering back then.

well we have only one (major, as in public) airport and public transport goes there.

All of my family lives in my country, and i'm not looking to move to another country, so no i see no reason at all to use an airplane

Sure, but the point is people are saying that online ordering is better, in absolute terms, which is a perk of the past decades of advancement (and it seems to fit the question you asked).

 

Congrats on not needing to travel ? Seems distinctly like a you thing.

 

If you want another perk of the past 20 years though, air travel has also gotten much better (safety, price). It's now "affordable" for people with middle/upper-middle class jobs to pay for airline travel for pleasure. So cheap that tons of people travel by airplane now too, whether for work, pleasure, or other necessity. (well, now being pre-COVID, but I suspect pleasure travel will rebound quickly, along with business)

 

@Lord Szechenyidid you watch YouTube growing up as a kid?

[Lord Szechenyi]

37 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

Sure, but the point is people are saying that online ordering is better, in absolute terms, which is a perk of the past decades of advancement (and it seems to fit the question you asked).

 

Congrats on not needing to travel ? Seems distinctly like a you thing.

 

If you want another perk of the past 20 years though, air travel has also gotten much better (safety, price). It's now "affordable" for people with middle/upper-middle class jobs to pay for airline travel for pleasure. So cheap that tons of people travel by airplane now too, whether for work, pleasure, or other necessity. (well, now being pre-COVID, but I suspect pleasure travel will rebound quickly, along with business)

 

@Lord Szechenyidid you watch YouTube growing up as a kid?

But then again, trains are slow as shit here, maxing out at 50-60hm/h

And thanks because you made me remember how the price decrease in plane tickets is a MASSIVE NEGATIVE.

See, some plane tickets are so cheap (talking pre covid here) that people would use it to go to those countries to party.

One of those countries is hungary.

In the past 8 years the capital has become a horrible place because of all those filthy tourists.

Makes me miss the iron curtain.

(back then, might have been a lot of eastern germans but at least they were nice and not too problematic)

Quote

Congrats on not needing to travel ? Seems distinctly like a you thing.

(as shown above, its quite a small country so i don't need a plane)

What do you mean it's a "you" thing?

I still can't understand why anyone in EUROPE would need to regularly take a plane.

Quote

did you watch YouTube growing up as a kid?

Yes, i remember the early days of youtube, the peak of newgrounds, and even other sites like gametrailers (rip) and screwattack (also rip)

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

But then again, trains are slow as shit here, maxing out at 50-60hm/h

And thanks because you made me remember how the price decrease in plane tickets is a MASSIVE NEGATIVE.

See, some plane tickets are so cheap (talking pre covid here) that people would use it to go to those countries to party.

One of those countries is hungary.

In the past 8 years the capital has become a horrible place because of all those filthy tourists.

Makes me miss the iron curtain.

(back then, might have been a lot of eastern germans but at least they were nice and not too problematic)

You live in a physically tiny country.

 

The province I live in, is literally more than 10 times physically larger than your entire country. Granted, I live in the second largest country on Earth.

[Letgomyleghoe]

22 minutes ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

Makes me miss the iron curtain.

(back then, might have been a lot of eastern germans but at least they were nice and not too problematic)

Quote

how can you miss it if you weren't even alive for it

 

there seems to be a lot of guessing what it was like, without you even experiencing it, that's like me saying "WWII was good because it brought many technological advancements" and while that might be true that technological advancements came out of it, I didn't experience any of the many many negatives, I only know what good came out of it.

[Blade of Grass]

41 minutes ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

And thanks because you made me remember how the price decrease in plane tickets is a MASSIVE NEGATIVE.

See, some plane tickets are so cheap (talking pre covid here) that people would use it to go to those countries to party.

One of those countries is hungary.

In the past 8 years the capital has become a horrible place because of all those filthy tourists.

I'm sure the tourism industry in Hungary would disagree. Tourism is a great economic driver for many regions around the world, and without it the regions/countries would be distinctly worse off. Tourism in Hungary accounts for about 10% of GDP and employment in 2017. 

Quote

Makes me miss the iron curtain.

Can't really miss something you never had. 

Quote

(as shown above, its quite a small country so i don't need a plane)

What do you mean it's a "you" thing?

I still can't understand why anyone in EUROPE would need to regularly take a plane.

You seem to be dismissing it as a benefit since you specifically don't use it, and ignore the larger socio-political and economic benefits that it's brought to the world. 

People travel by plane for tons of reasons, like you know, leaving their continent. Vacation, business travel, etc are all reasons why people fly. 

Plus, even within Europe, flying is fast and convenient, why would you not want to fly? 

Quote

Yes, i remember the early days of youtube, the peak of newgrounds, and even other sites like gametrailers (rip) and screwattack (also rip)

Heh, well then I would suggest that most of your life you have benefitted from modern technology that never existed in the 90s (or early 2000s), likely unknowingly. Yeah, maybe you had DSL, but your experience using a slow connection speed is significantly better than it has been historically, thanks in part to all of the optimizations that have been created over the years. Even stuff as simple as webpage loading have been significantly sped up, all by improving the way the client and servers operate (i.e. on the same olde network, pages still load faster/time to interactive is lower).

[Lord Szechenyi]

21 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

I'm sure the tourism industry in Hungary would disagree. Tourism is a great economic driver for many regions around the world, and without it the regions/countries would be distinctly worse off. Tourism in Hungary accounts for about 10% of GDP and employment in 2017. 

Can't really miss something you never had. 

You seem to be dismissing it as a benefit since you specifically don't use it, and ignore the larger socio-political and economic benefits that it's brought to the world. 

People travel by plane for tons of reasons, like you know, leaving their continent. Vacation, business travel, etc are all reasons why people fly. 

Plus, even within Europe, flying is fast and convenient, why would you not want to fly? 

Heh, well then I would suggest that most of your life you have benefitted from modern technology that never existed in the 90s (or early 2000s), likely unknowingly. Yeah, maybe you had DSL, but your experience using a slow connection speed is significantly better than it has been historically, thanks in part to all of the optimizations that have been created over the years. Even stuff as simple as webpage loading have been significantly sped up, all by improving the way the client and servers operate (i.e. on the same olde network, pages still load faster/time to interactive is lower).

Before tourism, VAT was 27%

now, it's still 27%, so yeah not really a good thing.

 

Well, vacation outside your own country is dumb, and for the rest (besides biz travel) are one time only travel (think immigration).

Why would i not fly? what's the point

 

That's not wrong it got optimized better, hell with my 2mbps i can stream (only youtube though) hd videos.

But i know that a decade ago i had dial up, that's sure

[GDRRiley]

On 11/26/2020 at 5:31 AM, trag1c said:

A lot of it was available but not widely or simply wasn't affordable for most.

GPS as a public thing didn't become available till mid 1980s after Russia shot down korean air 007