Added comment box to diary entries. Added chatroom to about page.
Learned < div align =" "> today! This is pure gold! Even I felt stupid typing in hundreds of & nbsps.
26:I’m reading this Internet Explorer webtoon by @Merryweatherey and it’s awesome. It's making me start to like IE/Edge a bit more.
25:Continuing site construction. Rather apprehensive about putting it up at this stage, but "fake it till you make it."
Bought a new audio book today, 《How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone》by Brian McCullough. What for? I had been calling myself a cyberpunk fan for a while, yet I knew close to nothing about the actual history, technology or terminologies. Had read about things like the ARPANET, CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee inventing the World Wide Web, but pretty much nothing else. Can't even tell the difference between DOS, a command line interface, a terminal and HTML, for example. Haven't even finished watching 《Serial Experiments Lain》yet, how embarrasing. You dare call yourself a fan?! I had downloaded 《Computer Lib/Dream Machines》 and 《Cyberia》, but what good are they if they are just sitting around eating dust? So I figured, I can listen to something when I exercise.
So, what I learned from the book up to now: Then-young geek Marc Andreessen and friends created a company called "Netscape" (saw some Netscape buttons floating around when exploring websites yesterday). Back then, being able to make a good browser was a huge feat - because there didn't exist one. Netscape made an awesome browser called "Navigator" (guess that's where Lain's Navi came from. Makes me kind of want to check it out). Everybody started downloading it (downloading and installing applications was also a huge deal). Microsoft was late to the World Wide Web party - it had been focused on rather theoretical concepts (not to say the WWW isn't just as much philosophical) like "information at your fingertips (IAYF)" and the "information superhighway", which is like smart TVs or the Internet of things or... I'm not even sure. When Microsoft came to, Netscape pretty much controlled the browser market - they were the WWW platform, just like Windows is the PC platform. Long story short, Microsoft played some dirty tricks and rolled out Internet Explorer, LOL.
I don't even know why I find it funny; it's just that I often see people mocking IE. Something about it having lots of bugs, maybe? I never used IE much so I can't speak for it. Born in 1997, wasn't really wired until 2008, and even then I mainly browsed forums on phoneswith UC and some other no-brand browsers. IIRC only began net surfing from 2010. My only memory of using browsers start with Chrome, although faint recollections about IE do exist. Then I used FireFox and Brave for short periods but never enjoyed them as much as Chrome. Edge is OK I guess, but all my booksmarks and forms are stored in Chrome. Safari is meh.
But I digress. The book went on to introduce web services: CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, MSN, etc. They all sound pretty fun; wish I could have seen them in action. These were dial-up services that clogged up your landline. When you executed certain actions, some systems would play sound recordings like “You’ve got mail.” I’ve never experienced anything like it. Lain’s OS was probably inspired by this feature. I do recall using ethernet cables around 2008 or something. I wasn't allowed to use the computer much, nor did I care for it. Speaking of which, we never had a desktop computer in our house. Always laptops. So for me, the idea of having a desktop at home sounds cooler than it probably should be. At some point, this new word "WiFi" started creeping up. I can't even remember when since I didn't pay attention - wasn't much of a fan of "those tech thingies." And just like that, WiFi quietly defeated LAN and conquered the world. I feel kind of nauseous thinking about it, all these things going on and I pretty much didn't notice. Are AT&T and Verizon web services? Also, there's another name for them, Internet service provider or ISP?
So... Yay me! Learning a bit about coding and the history of the Internet! By the way, I've always thought maybe there are some grammar Nazis out there whose pet peeve is people saying "Internet" when they actually mean "World Wide Web." But that can't be helped - Internet just rolls off the tongue so much smoothet than World Wide Web does wwwwwww
24:Hello, World!
Created this website today. Forgot what exactly I was looking at; saw suyu's site, and was intrigued by this "neocities" thing. I had been interested in old personal websites like those at geocities, after all.