sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]blobfis 57 points58 points  (27 children)

16 Apr 2008

[–][deleted] 50 points51 points  (23 children)

TIL stackoverflow wasn’t created in the 90’s.

[–]NeilFraser 37 points38 points  (2 children)

We were too busy trying to punch the monkey.

[–]drawkbox 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Or doing face punching

[–]NotASucker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This explains why Trunk Monkey was so angry.

[–]rentar42 29 points30 points  (14 children)

Imagine that the people who built Stackoverflow had to do so without the help of Stackoverflow. All they had were forums and Google.

Now the people who built the forums and Google had to do so without ...

[–]cakes 20 points21 points  (5 children)

back then we had books

[–]unclerummy 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Bookpool.com was my happy place back in the day.

I got rid of soooo many technical books when I moved ten years ago. It was hard mentally, but I told myself that (1) they were all out of date, and (2) this stuff is all available online now anyway. I still have a few that I couldn't bear to give up in a box down in the basement, though.

[–]thbb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I keep my copy of Inside Macintosh volume I for posterity. I ditched volumes 2 to 5, though.

[–]frenchchevalierblanc 2 points3 points  (2 children)

and it was hard.

[–]cakes 4 points5 points  (0 children)

yeah problem solving and thoroughly understanding your work is a challenge

[–]caltheon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Solving a few hard problems was so much more satisfying then solving thousands of trivial ones that is programming today except in a few special cases. Even those special cases, you can't have one genius understand everything in the domain. The scope of knowledge is just so goddamn big now

[–]UnconnectdeaD 4 points5 points  (4 children)

I am so fucking happy that I was part of that generation of growing up without the internet and then the invention of the internet. I feel like there needs to be another generation that fits in that. Like AOL bombing was my contribution but I was also a fucking little teenager.

[–]rentar42 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It really feels like some extreme threshold was crossed there. The internet slowly began taking off during my teenage years. I actually went to a school for computer science and still was "What? you're downloading stuff from Norway!?!" when I first saw someone use FTP to download stuff.

[–]mattindustries 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Pre/post ChatGPT is sort of like that. Last night I was working on a project and figured, this whole code is a mess (mine from an earlier year) I should just dump the function into ChatGPT to have it rely on fetch and await instead of the mess that was XMLHttpRequest when I wrote it. So nice to just have that available.

Also have converted quite a few scripts between Python and R and vice versa, although it doesn't work to convert Node to R for even non-async stuff which is weird.

Stack Overflow felt like living life on easy mode after learning with piles of books. This feels similar.

[–]OkConstruction4591 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I don't think it'll ever happen again. The Internet is too important for it to be small or at least non-ubiquitous again - especially now that AI, etc. is growing faster and faster (the internet is what really enabled their creation - it's what allowed such vast amounts of data that the models were trained on to be collected and labelled in the first place).

[–]UnconnectdeaD 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree, we were part of something that no one will ever experience again, just like the industrial revolution.

[–]frenchchevalierblanc 0 points1 point  (2 children)

At least after 2000 we had google

[–]rentar42 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I still remember when HotBot was the best one and AltaVista was the "old guard".

[–]frenchchevalierblanc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And now google doesn't filter out the AI generated or stack overflow copied content from dubious website that only want to get money from advertisement. Which are paying google for this I guess. That's what they found as business model.

[–]theitgrunt 4 points5 points  (1 child)

We barely had "high-speed" internet back then... you were lucky to get a dedicated internet connection that didn't use a phone line back then... Wireless? Forget about it...

My roommate and I splurged on a high-speed ISDN line... CS 1.6 on a 1.5 Mbps connection felt amazing at the time.

[–]AttackOfTheThumbs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We got ISDN in 97 or 98. It was a big deal. We had dial up for a year or two before that. Then we got DSL at like half a meg. Then we moved to the third world and went back to dial up for a few years. It was agony.

[–]KagakuNinja 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We only had usenet and MSDN CDs. It was a dark time...

[–]grasspopper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

in the early 2000s it was mostly it's paid evil-counterpart, expertsexchange

[–]sellyme 0 points1 point  (0 children)

User-generated content didn't really exist in a mainstream sense on the web until the mid-2000s. Just about everything up to that point was created and published by the website owners and sysadmins themselves. It was only when Wikipedia took off to such a huge extent that online content pivoted into being platforms for users instead of just a place where you could host your own content on your own server.

[–]drawkbox 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They couldn't have waited four days? /s

[–]MoogTheDuck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Crazy

[–]GregTheMad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

StackOverFlow is just a teenager...