If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA"). https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212
In the dotcom 1.0 future, shoppers tote a laptop to the supermarket so they can use their CueCat scanner to collect internet discount coupons over the supermarket wifi (which blasts them with ads).
The Teledesic satellite network got funded so you now have 9600 baud roaming data on your Microsoft PocketPC phone.
But pets.com mailed you a third dead Rottweiler this month, instead of the cat food subscription you ordered: the SKUs are cross-linked and freight shipping from China takes weeks.
@m … A time line in which Psion didn't flee screaming in the face of Microsoft's Project Jupiter, so we got smartphones descended from this by 2001: https://phonedb.net/img/psion_revo_plus.jpg
@guenterhack Yes, but bell-bottom jeans are a perennial that comes back from the grave once a generation: it needs to be something so lolwut that thereafter EVERYONE is all "what WERE they thinking back then?" Like, oh, kipper ties, leisure suits, or puffball miniskirts. Except they're 1970s/80s: not sure what the 90s equivalent would be?
Also, AltaVista bought and suffocated Google. The patents on Pagerank are in the same drawer as the 200 mpg carburettor, the automobile engine fuelled by water, and all the working perpetual motion machines.
@cstross Don't forget that it all runs on OSI protocols because TCP/IP never took off. And you have to pay phone company taxes on everything. Or is that too much?
@cstross that goes along with Alta Vista buying Google because Digital Equipment Corporation still owns them... and is a total powerhouse because OSI based DECNET is the dominant LAN technology...
It's maybe even the future of Shockwave Rider with videophones and accessing the net through keypads like Nicky Haflinger.
@cstross
My apartment building is next door to what was once the the offices of Pets dot com. They went out of business overnight, and walking by their offices one could see into the vacated cubicle farm -- rows and rows of hastily-vacated desks under harsh fluorescents, nothing remaining except dust, the occasional power cable and an Aeron chair...
But on every desk, the company mascot beanie baby.
That was the one thing that everyone left behind while packing up.
@jwz I bet you could make a mint auctioning one of those pets dot com beanie babies now. Maybe even enough to recoup the ground rent in SF on the closet it sat in for the intervening 24 years!
That reminds me of all of the books that were promoted by management at companies I once worked for. "Your management believes this book made a difference for them and, together, it will make a difference for our company! There will be group readings starting next week."
Often seen in empty cubicles soon after the handouts.
@JHB17@jwz My trigger for leaving old-SCO in 1995 was passing my manager's cubicle one day and seeing a blue hardback on her desk. I looked inside the flyleaf and saw IBM STAFF HANDBOOK (1980). And fast-marched back to my desk, picked up the phone, and begged "give me a job?" to the boss of the very new startup (4 weeks since founding!) I'd been doing side-projects with for a few months.
@JHB17@jwz@cstross when I got to SGI in 1997, The Innovator's Dilemma was on the shelves of most of management. Nonetheless SGI fell prey to TID over the next decade. No idea where the books got to but a lot of the management got to NVIDIA and AMD.
@oddhack@JHB17@jwz Spot on! They can all see that the ship is sinking, but they've been told to stay on deck rearranging the chairs, and whenever they try the doors (to go below decks and fix the leak) they find they're chained shut inside.
@cstross@JHB17@jwz oddly, SGI CEO Bob Bishop, who presided over the aftermath of the initial deadly decisions, frequently compared changing the company direction to changing the direction of a supertanker, difficult and slow.
What he didn't say was that the supertanker was heading for the impervious horrors of a lee shore, and the reefs had already clawed out the bottom of the ship. But we all could hear the screeching from below-decks.
@oddhack@JHB17@jwz SGI built a complete stack, like Apple today, but Apple astonishingly still manages to innovate from time to time. I suspect it's b/c Apple keeps their product teams very lean and is unafraid to kill unreleased products right up to the point they're ready to start volume production?
I wonder how SGI would have fared if in 1997 they'd wound up with Tim Cook in charge? (He joined Apple in March 1998 as SVP Global Operations. In 1997 he was a president at Compaq.)
@Phosphenes@cstross Because at the time, pets dot com's business model -- "you get to pay shipping on a giant bag of cat litter instead of just picking it up at the corner store" -- was considered so ridiculous on its face that it was the punchline to a joke.
@cstross Sega never stopped making home consoles…but they also never moved to 3D. Things were dicey for ~15 years, eking out on the strength of 2D MMO Sonic platformers that sold to a highly dedicated audience—an audience so obsessed with doing what Nintendon’t that they managed to keep The Sega Channel service viable indefinitely.
By 2020, the AAA gaming industry was so bloated, Sega was able to bounce back on the strength of the retro trend. Sega Channel is now the most used Roku app.
Oh God and by God I mean Cthulhu, this is the time line in which the Intel Itanium didn't fail, Macs still run on Power architecture (Apple was eventually acquired by IBM), and Microsoft OS/2 4.0 runs everywhere on MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC workstations. Linux is nearly extinct thanks to restrictive embrace-and-extinguish commercial bootloader licensing terms ...
@jsr Not quite: this is a Sculley-era Apple continuation, so it'd be named something like "2005 Edition Stylus Deluxe for the NewtonOS® MessagePad™ Centrica Pro/15 Power Edition4 Release 3.1".
@cstross@sabik about that .. when I was at an open source event that Stallman also attended 1992(ish, I forget) I got told to stay out of reach of him by other women. It's not been news, it's just that nobody cared.
@cstross Jobs died of pancreatic cancer much earlier in relative obscurity, fanboyed by the same set who worship Wozniak. Apple acquired NeXT and adopted only the design aesthetic. John Sculley is now CEO of IBM.
BeOS was a huge niche success and can be found everywhere on kiosks and embedded devices. Your electric car charging station can play movies on two screens and grandmaster level chess on the other two, all running off a single embedded Motorola 680F0 processor.
@cstross Jobs continues to helm PixarDisneyLucasfilmMarvel (which is of course called “Pixar”). The Muppets now only appear in Pixar films and in live performances using that uncanny valley “hologram” technology they use for Gorillaz and J-Pop avatars.
@cstross Remember "amazon sidewalk"? You can't bar your internet of things devices from accessing your router because they form a mesh network with other IOT devices until they find a neighbor?
@landley Yes, yes, wifi signals propagate through walls and beam shaping is a thing. (Tell me you haven't read "Dark State", by moi, published 2018, without telling me you haven't read "Dark State" …)
Meanwhile everything is running on Sun servers with SPARC 57 processors and JVM co-processors. Sun didn't go bust, they managed to become the "dot in dot com", as they put it back then. There is no Cloud, but you can lease Sun servers running Solaris 2100 by the month, with low introductory rates for new startup companies and easy upgrades (at suitability steep prices) as your company grows.
@cstross A ramping cycle of increasing computing power and resources as AI's race to generate ads, ad-blockers, click-fakers, click-faker-detectors, etc. Tell the story of the end collapse by tracing the history of the last advertisement (which, like most ads, no human ever views), the long pipeline of data and events through which it was generated, the enormous hardware and software stacks involved from 'start' to finish, and total disconnect from social and physical conditions of the world. .
@stevenaleach The Last Ad is basically The Funniest Joke in the World (per Monty Python) with a "buy me!" branding payload attached at the end that nobody lives long enough to see.
Neither of them fit the dot-com 1.0 era—roughly 1995-2000.
(I was there: worked for one of the first web consultancies in Scotland, then freelance contract stuff, then at a credit card payment service provider that eventually got eaten by Mastercard.)
@sbszine Oh, that's a late period bolt-on! For dot-com 1.0 cray-cray you need shoppers toting a laptop to the supermarket just so they can use their CueCat scanner to scan bar codes and collect their internet discount coupons over the supermarket wifi (which blasts them with ads). The Teledesic satellite network got funded so everyone on the planet has 9600 baud broadband to their Microsoft PocketPC phone. And pets.com just mailed you the third dead and decaying St. Bernard of the month.
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