What a stupid article. Usenet has been quietly doing the same thing for decades, it never fell. The real reason Google groups is being shutdown is likely their partnership with Giganews ending. GN freely peered and hosted the content for Googlr, and GN was sold a few years ago.
Seriously people nowadays seem to be utterly convinced that not having endless growth that increases every year is a failure when that’s a metric mostly used by fucking shareholders, not mattering to user quality
Telnet was the internet for me in the early years.
There was a bug at the local university dialup for students and teachers - if you failed to login three times it would drop you to a screen where it told you to disconnect but you could actually telnet from that screen.
I used that to go to a few internet BBS’s, and then eventually to MUDs which were early text based multiuser RPGs.
It was fantastic, in the years Apple ][ was released. Far fewer children would have gotten into computers without it. Bad habits you learned were easily corrected in a CS program.
I wrote an almost-game once in basic that ran a pacman around the screen, but it was too slow, so I learned enough to rewrite the sprite animation in assembly. At first, it didn’t work; while there were no errors, the animation never showed on the screen. It took me three days of debugging to figure out that it was working; it just animated so fast you couldn’t see the sprite animate across the screen. I think it was the singlemost revealing aspect of computer programming that I have ever learned.
BASIC was an ok tool for teaching. What I have a problem with today, is that it’s the middle of the 20-gosh-darn-20s and I still have to write BASIC to automate stuff in excel, in an IDE without any features introduced in other IDEs since 1995.
But was BASIC ok? Sure it was. Is BASIC still ok? Oh hells nah!
BASIC was great for teaching coding well into the 90s, I have fond memories of hanging out in the computer lab with my best friend and a very permissive (and patient) computing teacher in primary school.
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