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Comment by moreentropy | Hacker News Reader

That bit about total anonymity is just not true. Usually you would use your organization's news server (because every ISP/university had one), so you could be easily located. Plus, it was part of the netiquette to post using your real name / well known identity.

Thinking of the 90s internet makes me all sentimental.

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Things were better, then.

Yeah we had to contend with flash sites and low bandwidth, and didn't have slick css3 and backnode.js but the web was more fun in those days.

Flash sites? If the content didn't load in lynx it wasn't worth viewing.

I still think this sometimes.

I fall back on text-mode readers (usually w3m) for sites which are too broken in GUI browsers. It works rather more often than you'd expect (in large part because web crawlers need text).

Sometimes?

I used Lynx once.

That's funny because "Eternal September" was coined in 1994 (i.e. people were exclaiming "things were better then" in reference to the time before September 1993).

It reminds me of "I Used to Love H.E.R." a song released in 1994 about how great rap used to be. http://rapgenius.com/Common-i-used-to-love-her-lyrics

I've known about the Eternal September for quite some time, but I'm not sure why it's funny.

Eternal September is/was a usenet meme, not really having much relation to the world wide web.

Sure, you're probably more knowledgeable about it than me. I was only observing that "things used to be better" is a constant theme and when one has nostalgia for a certain time, it's worth noting that people active then were reminiscing about an even earlier time.

Well sure, but all that seems to indicate to me is that things are always getting worse.

What's changed more over time -- "things" or your perception of them?

How about it's just an indicator that people always think things are getting worse.

Every generation is always nostalgic for the time just before the current generation...

The article isn't loading for me, but there was the anon.penet.fi anonymizer, at least until it got shut down by, IIRC, the scientologists.

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