The inverted-T arrow key layout is a relatively recent development. Well, it was before you were born, but we grownups remember the welcome transition.
http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/InverseT-History.html
It’s pretty shitty to sneer at children for not deciding to be social pariahs.
1 Like
I grew up on the C64. It took me ages to get the hang of inverted-T. Shifted-arrows worked fine! Why would you mess with success?
This story makes a useful object lesson for folks who assert that [their preferred system/method/program] is obviously the best way of doing things, as evidenced by how productive they are with it. Anything can be easy with enough practice, but “easy for me” is not the same thing as easy.
1 Like
Arrow keys? Luxury!
We had HJKL and we were happy to have them.
Also, later on, the Spectrum taught us QAOP.
We had An Altair at school with little old silk-covered green screns. Wumpus was our only game until someone found an insecure admin account, then it was free-range account punking.
Once we got a software upgrade and it enabled us to backspace if we mistyped our password.
It was all fun and games until someone did an rm -rf *
1 Like
A lot of us who also went through the torture of IRC, ICQ/messenger, live/deadjournal got to about the era of myspace and decided we were washing our hands of the drama.
1 Like
I keep saying this, and it continues being true: we need to make the internet harder to use again, dammit.
1 Like
So am I, occasionally.
2 Likes
why back in my day we had to wait for usenet posts to get replicated, and rely on sneakernet to update all the computers in the lab. and none of this fancy .gifjpgpng crap. we had ascii art. and we liked it. now get off my LAN.
1 Like
Facebook became available to all college students in 2004.
This doesn’t jive with my memories. In the spring of 2005, people at my university were very aware of Facebook, but it had not yet come to our (relatively small) state school. Someone was so desperate for a Facebook that they created their own clone of Facebook specifically for our university. Within a week over half the campus was using this clone site. The admins of this site then petitioned Facebook to expand to our university. A month or two (my memory is admittedly faulty, this was a decade ago now) later, Facebook officially expanded to include us.
I believe that FB expanded to anyone with a .edu address later that year. I’m having difficulty finding a source to back up this memory of mine (or to refute it); if anyone has evidence either way I’d like to see it.
Awww, I like IRC, still do though it’s been 6 years since I had any need to use it for anything
2 Likes
1 Like
And we liked it! 
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
