Let's all meet up in the Y2K(blog.gingerbeardman.com) |
Let's all meet up in the Y2K(blog.gingerbeardman.com) |
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010413114456/http://www.thereg...
EDIT: I mean, things like this obviously keep happening nowadays in closed (and not so closed) social media circles, but you won't see an online publication putting down names in written form like that.
Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P
First I want to say they weren't really like Deliveroo because they had their own kitchens. Or to be specific, one kitchen in Bloomsbury which made every major style of food. It was actually quite an amazing kitchen, with a Japanese sushi chef working next to an Indian curry cook and a pizza oven and a load more. (The quality of the food was top notch.) They also had their own salaried call centre and delivery staff.
At the time I was consulting they had been losing money hand over fist for years and their investors had parachuted in a "high powered executive" to sort everything out. She had not the first clue about the business, or the Internet, or much else, but everyone in the company deferred to her because she was the new big boss and shouted a lot. She used to turn up in a massive silver car late, order the sushi chef to make her a meal (for free obviously), and then leave early every day. Most of our work involved explaining why her ideas for the website and online advertising couldn't possibly work, which was very painful for me and everyone else. I pushed really hard to introduce a mobile-friendly website and did all the work on it, making the food menus work on the terrible web browser on some high end phone (of the time). It was all canned because the investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.
The company folded or was sold for parts soon afterwards.
Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes
De-alienate yourself! Feel the tools again! Learn low-level concepts and use them in your work (data-driven design, functional programming, etc.).
Then it's like woodworking and cooking again.
Would love to see a show with the seriousness and production quality of Mad Men but set in the 90s.
My very first work experience in a small software house in 1996 and their internet connection was ISDN so it had to dial-up and then got the staggering speed of 64Kb/s, you could also hear it so occasionally the boss would ask who was using it i.e. costing whatever we were metered at, which was probably like £1 for 5 minutes.
Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 2001 after the collapse, from Zeus Technology who had a high performance single-thread select-based webserver. We could feel the cascade failure as our ISP customers went bankrupt or stopped paying their invoices.
that seals it.. my nostalgia for this time (from many an adult's tale in my young life) was not misplaced.
If only it still felt like this, you can see it sometimes, if only a little. And maybe we'll feel the same way looking back to now from what will be.
Early 90s, new top-of-line Compaq arrives, for me, project manager. We open it to install network card - token ring (yes, it sucked to be you - you could almost see the little tokens slouching round the ring).
me: jesus, just look at that heat-sink!
male programmer: yeah, they really knocked it out with that anodised blue - can i get the next one?
female tech lead: you sad, sad bastards.
- XMPP Chat
- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)
Then let's game!