alt Hacker NewsLet's all meet up in the Y2K
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"When work felt like home"
Gosh I haven't experienced that in a while. Working remote really does feel like a death sentence sometimes
> Diesel jeans and jumper, Deliverance food box on the partition (decades before Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, etc).
Might be me being a millennial, but I love the 90s/early 2000s "edge", calling a delivery service "Deliverance" :-P
The images really do seem like yesterday, not 25 years ago and could really fit nyc, Seattle, sf easily.
Just a testament to how much information we are now able to record starting 25 years ago.
These photos are incredible.
Would love to see a show with the seriousness and production quality of Mad Men but set in the 90s.
Y2K was different because we got to see different shapes, sizes and types of hardware because there were so many companies that produced them. Nowadays it’s most a monopoly or a duopoly and everyone tries to copy whatever that is released by Apple and it’s quite boring
> Omni Trio being played regularly
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.
At my last employer we had a extensive photo gallery with workplace pictures taken from the 60s and up to present day, thousands if images. It was fun to browse through when you had some downtime.
But, as with this collection, I was most surprised how little things like fashion had changed between say 2000 and 2025. Sure, eyeglasses and some clothing articles (mostly suits/coats/ties, which were a bit roomier and bigger back then...) could give away the era, but in the pics where people just wore chinos or jeans and some casual sweater or t-shirt, not much has changed.
Compare that to looking at a picture from 2000 and just 1990, 10 years, and the difference is like night and day. Or 1990 and 1980.
At some point on the early 2000s, casual everyday wear among adults just stopped evolving, or slowed down tremendously. The giveaway is usually the tech and furniture, or photo quality (how it was captured).
A nice nostalgia hit. The "Bondi blue" iMac was my first workplace computer, for a local council. I had Photohop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress, making websites, banner graphics(!), print artwork, all kinds of things. Even then, I do remember the iMac being painfully slow.
I spy a copy of the "Cold Fusion Web Application Construction Kit"! I worked for Allaire in Sydney in 2000, then Macromedia when they got acquired in 2001. I used to visit a lot of studios like that. The dotcom boom was a wild ride.
I remember wanting to be important by upgrading the size of my monitor from the default 14" to 21" but unfortuantely, it also took up 50% of your desk space so I split the difference and lived with 17".
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.
"High prices shame Britain" made me chuckle
Hit me up if you want to build a 2000-era (V)LAN:
- XMPP Chat
- Layer 2 VPN (IPX!!)
Then let's game!
Enormous monitors aside it's funny, even though more than a quarter of a century has passed, how contemporary those office scenes look. Even the on point trendiness of the "unfinished"/exposed industrial aesthetic really hasn't changed.
In recent years I've stepped into quite a lot of offices that look a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k. And, in fact, all of the trendier offices I've been in since I started work at around that time have looked a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k.
Why that strikes me as slightly odd is that if you rewound a further 26 years to 1974 I suspect things would probably look very different. And, of course, the past 26 years have had quite an impact on the way I look.
I notice the Cold Fusion book in the second photo didn't get a mention but I can't overstate: that was hot shit back then. If you knew Cold Fusion in 1999/2000 you could pretty much name your day rate contracting in the City of London. Sadly I did not know Cold Fusion and graduated into the ongoing dotcom crash during y2k so I took what I could get job-wise.
Ah yes, back when caring about hardware was a thing.
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.
All those gumdrop Macs sent me back to my time in a Flash cartoon shop that was filled with those things.
"[...] at one point they asked me to work a weekend and I already had plans, so they asked what it would take. I wanted a classic FIAT 500, so I named the price of the car: multiple thousands of pounds. The management said yes, it was their only option. So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done."
>Gen Z is just lazy, all it takes is standing straight and a firm handshake.
That's all it took for you!
Why is the dentist chair hack not more of a thing?
I need it.
> at one point they asked me to work a weekend and I already had plans, so they asked what it would take. I wanted a classic FIAT 500, so I named the price of the car: multiple thousands of pounds. The management said yes, it was their only option. So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done.
Is this a joke?
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and now thanks to outsourcing and AI no one can make a living this way again.
Focusing more on the "social side" rather the HW part, there is the part about the "Viral email", which must have been something that went viral in the UK Internet circles but not outside (I don't remember it and Y2K Internet was much smaller). Investigating about it you can end up reading The Register "article" about it [1] and well, that's something that definitely would not be published nowadays. Names and surnames of all the people involved in it, the literal sentence of the viral email copypasted there. It really shows how a different time it was regarding privacy and personal data.
[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.