ok i'm going to do a list of all the 1990s shit i love and seriously miss. i'll try to categorize it i guess? https://twitter.com/beka_valentine/status/1286746729430147072

also it's not going to be exclusively 90s, but rather kind of just "first internet boom culture"?

which bleeds over into the 80s and 00s

so, starting with visual media:

80s and through the 90s and early 2000s, there were slews of these computer animation compilations like The Mind's Eye

you also had weird shit like Animusic, which was an entire series of music videos featuring fictitious robot music things

throughout the 80s and 90s you had wild TV shows like Computer Chronicles, which was a sit down nerdy fest. it would cover all sorts of topics such as hard drives and computer music

Cheifet also did a TV show called The Net Cafe, focusing especially on the internet culture of the 90s

here's their episode on ~hackers~

featuring all time babe and @2000_mondo editor St. Jude

both of these shows are on @internetarchive, as are a bunch of the animation compilations <3

The Net Cafe was absolutely wild. in typical 90s fashion, every episode had an entire multi-minute segment devoted to sending you files through your TV using something called a CYBERBLAST which you can see at the beginning of this video:

cyberblasts used TV modems, which took advantage of TVs high bandwidth (compared to dialup) to send data at rather high speeds, by encoding the data into a visual binary patch on the screen.

today we do similar things with QR codes sometimes, but this was in 1995! over TV!!

the mid 90s also gave us monumentally important hacker movies such as The Net:

and then there were cute scenes like Unix! I know that! in Jurassic Park, which featured actual Unix file browser fsn

and of course, of COURSE, the best movie of all time, Hackers

the late 90s and early 2000s gave us shows like The Screen Savers on TechTV (ht @leolaporte)

the 90s also gave us wild visual aesthetics. here’s a nice thread by @gravislizard about the weird dark retro futurism of the 90s https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/1106621777382264832?s=21 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/1106621777382264832

the 90s also gave us an entire 3d animated tv show set INSIDE a computer

the late 80s and early 90s net/tech culture gave us the magazines @2000_mondo and it’s corporate knock off Wired

this has been a lot of visual media but the 90s internet boom also has a very heavy cultural component that has echoes through to today in subtle ways

what don’t mean by that? because like duh there was a particular 90s culture, but the net boom culture of the 90s has its own cultural component

the 90s came on the heels of the 80s (duh), which was the core era of the Cyberpunk movement pioneered by @GreatDismal, @bruces, @Cadigan () and so many others

cyberpunk is still a big “thing” today but not like it was in the 80s

see, 80s cyberpunk was NEW and incredibly mind blowing for a lot of people

it valorized high tech counter-cultural individual potentiality, creating the archetype of the computer hacker who can radically change the world by challenging corporate power structures

so when the internet boom came around, we got a whole bunch of new startups founded by ... computer hackers trying, often, to change the world by challenge corporate dominances of various sorts

the parallels were obvious to everyone

in fact, the parallels were SO obvious that many companies back then had @nealstephenson’s Snow Crash as REQUIRED READING for all new hires because they said “this is what we’re trying to build”

think about that for a moment. how wild is that???

many startups in the 90s saw themselves as legitimately bringing about the cyberized future of cyberpunk. it was an integral part of their self understanding

let’s take an example: VR. we’re all familiar with VR in its modern incarnations from Oculus and so forth but VRs first boom was in the 90s. whole companies were created around VR technology that today seems hard to imagine

anyone remember VRML? the VR analog of HTML, created by @mpesce and other folx? you had whole VRML startups, naturally with quintessentially 90s ads in @2000_mondo. named Ono Sendai, after the zaibatsu in @GreatDismal’s Sprawl Trilogy

this is how companies in the 90s saw themselves! as the literal embodiment of the cyberpunk vision

this was also the era of the popularization of the nascent transhumanist and singularitarian movements. the grand daddy of it all, Ray Kurzweil, founded a website ( http://kurzweilai.net ) with a weekly newsletter that tracked the progress olof transhumanist technology

in typical Internet Boom fashion, http://KurzweilAI.net  had some immense vibes, not least of which was the fact that it was a Flash website

sadly, @internetarchive doesn't have all the images in its capture of the html site :(

you see that link at the top left? "Ramona!"

what's that? it's a fucking chatbot. this website had a built in low-quality AI as part of its vibe

http://KurzweilAI.net  also had something kind of amazing called The Brain which was a kind of hypertextual encyclopedia of interconnected ideas, built using a version of @TheBrainTech's software

that particular part of the site was quite amazing. i talked about my attempt to archive and recreate it in this thread https://twitter.com/beka_valentine/status/1211270214341410816

the http://KurzweilAI.net  brain, Ono Sendai VR, and so many other companies, are just small pieces that are representative of a core 90s tech boom cultural feature:

unbridled optimism about what the future could hold

the tech boom of the 90s really believed, at some level, that computers and the internet were, as Kusanagi put it, the net is vast and infinite

everything was unstable and open to change, no fixed future existed. what did the net of The Future look like? who knows! it was still being defined!

it could be ANYTHING!

people experimented with all sorts of new and wild ways of thinking about the net and computers, from VR to The Palace to HTML to cyberblast to all sorts of shit

today we think of the net as like.. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and some other sites, and then maybe some resources like Wikipedia, Wikia, etc.

but in the 90s there was this overriding sense that there was no clear well defined Future

also the 90s had such an incredible amount of DEMOCRATIC techno-optimism

back then you had lots of hosted website gadgets like Angelfire and Geocities

the core principle being that EVERYONE should have a website!

the democratic nature of websites wasn't just about democratic HOSTING, but about LEARNING

a dominant way to learn HTML, CSS, and JS back then was to view the page source and copy stuff

this is actually one of the big reasons that websites are not some weird compiled format: you can View Source and LEARN

this was of course back before the ridiculousness of modern web frameworks took hold

back when websites were simple, and we talked about "DHTML"

where are we today with the web? everything is locked down, Twitter is contemplating going subscription, we're all trapped in this corporate hellscape, our ability to imagine a democratically controlled net is just gone

but the 90s! hoo boy the 90s was hopeful!

anyway that's about the end of this thread but to round it off, here's some music from two major games from that era that i feel captures the mood

and here's the second