I was having some good fun chatting with other randos on here, then a few minutes ago nearly everyone was kicked out of the room, and now I just see a few bots talking to each other with some canned phrases. Bummer.
The first thing I did with computers that had any success was a WWIV BBS in the LA area called Altered States.
I think I ran it on a 386 under MS‑DOS. At some point I was getting about forty calls a day and the line was busy a lot. I would drop into sysop mode and talk to people sometimes. One of those times was actually a girl in real life. She ended up being my girlfriend for a couple of years -- fun times....
Neat! Reminds me of circa 92-94 Prodigy/CompuServe days. By '96 I recall having moved on to local dial-up ISPs. The longer handshake was well worth it for 56k versus the 300-2400 many of us came from.
This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.
This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).
In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.
It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!
Vibe-coded or not what grinds my gears in those throwback computer interfaces is how imprecise they are. I the case of Windows, 9x had a meticulous pixel perfect alignment of widgets, great looking 2px thick bevel effects and all the proportions needed to be right for it feel "right". But almost all those throwback attempts, and specially now with AI coding, forget about this and seem to only go as far as thinking having a grey background with some tacky bevel is enough to recreate it.
The state runs on Upstash Redis and is shared across three different frontends (React/Vite deployed on Vercel):
* The standalone chat interface (https://lolchat.rip)
* A Windows 95 simulator (https://56k.rip)
* A Mac System 7 simulator (https://dialup.rip)
Users dialing in from the Mac desktop and users on the Win95 machine end up in the exact same rooms talking to each other.
I think I ran it on a 386 under MS‑DOS. At some point I was getting about forty calls a day and the line was busy a lot. I would drop into sysop mode and talk to people sometimes. One of those times was actually a girl in real life. She ended up being my girlfriend for a couple of years -- fun times....
If you want to talk to people I got https://superchat.win/ which has a browser version and connects to humans.
Do you think it’s the less nostalgic style? Or the fact you actually talk to people that brings that out?
For what it’s worth, that was indeed a bit depressing.
So many UI elements are absolutely WRONG.
(For reference: https://infinitemac.org)
This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).
In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.
It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!
Simple straightforward buttons; the screen is not filled to the brim with advertising…
https://www.magviz.ca