Quote:
Originally posted by sycamore
You can park it at my place, but you have to promise to tell stories about the good ol' days, complete with ridiculous exaggerations.
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Well anyway I remember back in '94 those idiots who were running the SIGUCCS conference booked it in Ypsilanti, Michigan for the same weekend as the Penn State/Michigan foorball game. People ended up staying at three different hotels because rooms were so scare. Shuttle buses?? BAH! We had to walk. Walk, I tell you, and it was uphill both ways. Do you know in those days they actually had 9600 baud serial hookups in the email room? Yeah, and we thought it was hot stuff too. Anyway I was giving a paper that year... yeah, paper... you do know what paper is, don't you boy?? Any way of course it was the first session on Monday morning and I had to haul ass over from my hotel to the conference center. The paper was about gopher. It was one of the last papers presented on gopher, maybe the last ever. Hmm I'll have to look that up maybe I finally did something to get me an asterisk in the history books. Anyway--where was I--oh yeah I was giving a paper. It was the first session early on Monday morning. And it was jam packed too, everybody wanted to hear about gopher. That "world wide web" crap was still experimental, and nobody wanted to have pictures with their internet access anyway. TEXT was what people wanted, lots and lots of TEXT... efficient, and information-rich. Why, people love text. That's why to this day almost anybody you talk to would rather sit down and read a nice book instead of watching that damned television or playing those stupid video games. And gopher, why gopher had lots of text, sonny, and no pictures. By god, that was what people WANTED back then. What good's a damn picture anyway? Just slurps up your bandwidth and you only got 256 colors anyway. So anyway I'm talking about Gopher. And it was packed. Sure I was the only presenter talking about gopher, and there were maybe 12 or 15 talking about the WWW, but nobody went to hear them. Oh yeah, that's right, of course I'm remembering it right, you couldn't PAY somebody to use the web. And I tell you, I used overhead transparencies too. None of that Powerpoint shit back then, you actually had to do some work if you were gonna give a lecture. You actually had to develop some CONTENT, boy. Yeah that's right, CONTENT. So anyway, there I was at SIGUCCS in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You know it was a real pain getting over the the conference center because they scheduled it for the same weekend as the Penn State-Michigan game and I'll tell you you couldn't BUY a hotel room. Of course I was presenting on Monday morning, pretty early. It was about gopher, I bet you probably never even heard of gopher much less used it... I... I'm a bit sleepy, I'll tell you about it some other time...
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