Olds go nostalgic for the good old days of tech

Millie_Fink · January 9, 2025, 12:13pm

Charming!

Wow, abomination indeed (as with the site itself!). I just heard yesterday that in Italy, among the most abominable culinary sins one can commit is putting cheese on seafood.

nosaj · January 9, 2025, 12:36pm

Amazing.

Way down the bottom:

Created: Sep 5, 1995
Last Updated: Mar 12, 2006

Also:

That really takes me back.

Axolotl · January 9, 2025, 1:11pm

And the page has hardly any trackers on it. Just some Javascript

ETA: speling

Millie_Fink · January 9, 2025, 1:40pm

Which reminds me-- pagers! Those also haven’t come to mind for me in many a moon.

I never did have one. They seemed like something "official,’ or “business” oriented, and not for personal use.

I’ve been watching the show Halt and Catch Fire, so of course, a lot of obsolete tech comes up, e.g., curly/spiral phone cords, and New frontiers in Antivirus applications! (I’ve noticed some anachronisms the other way, especially in things characters say, like wanting to “hack” some software, or asking about a product’s “price point.”)

nosaj · January 9, 2025, 2:02pm

Time to re-watch The Wire?

RAvery · January 9, 2025, 2:11pm

They are still being made. I saw someone wearing a pager on the train a few months ago.

timd · January 9, 2025, 2:20pm

Not necessarily a good thing

Millie_Fink · January 9, 2025, 2:51pm

Oh for the days when pagers didn’t have embedded explosives!

(I sometimes fear my phone that way. If they can do it to pagers…)

Hanglyman · January 9, 2025, 4:51pm

That reminds me of something else I hadn’t thought about in years, a frozen personal-size shrimp pesto pizza that grocery stores around here used to sell in the early 2000s. It was astoundingly good. The deli of one of the “fancy” grocery stores (before they were all eclipsed by Whole Foods) also sold a salmon pesto spinach panini that may have been the most delicious sandwich I’ve ever eaten. That store went out of business around 2007 and the space has lain vacant ever since, as though cursed. There are a few other spaces like that around town, where apparently whoever owns it finds it more profitable to leave it a dead hollow shell for literally decades than to ever make it affordable enough for any new business to move in.

FGD135 · January 9, 2025, 6:01pm

That’s so last millennium.

noahdjango · January 9, 2025, 8:13pm

the original website for the Space Jam movie is still up
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

and realultimatepower (dot) net is still up
https://realultimatepower.net/

Green · January 9, 2025, 9:18pm

I miss the little ding-ding and spinner thing on gas pumps.

Axolotl · January 9, 2025, 9:46pm

Welcome to bo…oh wait.

kxkvi · January 9, 2025, 10:02pm

Welcome to Elsewhere!

Millie_Fink · January 9, 2025, 10:18pm

Elsewhere Cafe, that is.

Macha latte, I imagine?

Melizmatic · January 9, 2025, 10:34pm

Maybe.

RAvery · January 10, 2025, 1:14am

Grey_Devil · January 10, 2025, 1:18am

mindysan33 · January 10, 2025, 2:15am

The host in the screen shot looks so. very. excited about the topic… Good geek!

ficuswhisperer · January 10, 2025, 3:47am

I had a pager back in the day, one of those cheap Motorola specials. I had it pimped out with a clear case.

All the real ballers had SkyPager, though. Here’s a wonderful relic from this era:

To this day I can still remember the SkyPager phone number thanks to the impression this song left on me.

Eventually for work I got one of those super fancy ones that could receive words and stuff. I was never cool enough to have one of the two way ones, but at that point cell phones were becoming pretty ubiquitous and cheap anyway.

Pagers are still used today in certain fields (mostly healthcare and safety). They are cheap and reliable, and the infrastructure is rock solid and resilient.