I hope someone writes a book about this subject and sends it to me. But in conversation I realize that this is going to shape a generation. I grew up when the internet was barely a thing, I was 10 the first time I used the internet in 1993 and I was able to talk to my father abroad over a telnet type of communication. I did not know that this was interesting or special, I thought it was similar to morse code.
I had no idea that 20 years later I would be one of the foremost asm/c coders in the industry of server coding. Nowadays I just laugh when people tell me that their internet accounts were dozens of quid per minute. Mine was free and I coded one of the first free telnet servers for a friend and then realized how bad it was when I had a slackware build in the late 90s.
It was the wild west, it was an era where you could literally code your app and it was a new thing, nes and snes were a big thing at the time and i struggled to learn 6502 and 65c816 assembly to try to help convert emulators to linux and it was all for not, the real coding money was in html and the ability to understand it and to minimize your bandwidth usage.
It was a pointless struggle and still to this day i don't really understand much beyond the construction of settlements. Each company wanted a stake in some primitive settlement, chat, mail, games, etc.
I was wondering if before these land grabs if there were people with stories about the land that existed before the corporations, for me it was simple, you were on the internet and you could code your own things, now you can only code for a secondary company. Surely someone remembers a simpler time?