Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Productivity, Odds and ends, Internet, Apple
A trip back in time with MacUser
Reader John sent us a fascinating little trip back in time (thanks!) he took on his blog: he found a 1996 copy of MacUser about all of the amazing applications available on the Internet, and decided go look at what had become of them. Sadly, most of them have gone missing, but the old names sound familiar: CU-SeeMe for messaging, Lycos for search, and Happy Puppy for gaming. It's almost hard to believe there was a time before Skype, Google, and Steam, but 1996 was it.Even Apple has moved on -- their "/documents/product-support" page, something you'd think would have survived all this time, is gone. It's amazing the turnover the Internet's gone through in just 10 years. It's hard to believe that in 2029, something like Google.com will be retaken by a domain squatter as everyone's moved on to the next big thing.
But then again, things are different these days -- Google has obviously successfully figured out how to monetize their free service, and most of the original web companies went down because they could pull that off. But you never know -- a site you visit all the time might be completely changed or gone ten years from now.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Luigi193 said 10:55AM on 1-31-2009
LOL! If you click that TUAW archive link, you'll see an article title "Flash Memory: Who Cares?" about if the iPod will ever have flash memory...
http://web.archive.org/web/20041205002247/http://www.tuaw.com/entry/1234000420022625/
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Vince said 11:35AM on 1-31-2009
"...couldn't pull that off."?
Interesting article. Good stuff, guys.
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(01) said 11:48AM on 1-31-2009
Yeah, it's been pretty crazy how much things have changed. I remember when there were NO pay sites, purchasing online was pretty much non-existent and there was basically no corporate/ad presence. Does this make me old?
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zeero said 12:22PM on 1-31-2009
Great trip down memory lane.
On a side note:
I cut out 2 Lbs of fat per week by obeying this 1 old rule.
I didn't eat as much.
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Howard said 12:52PM on 1-31-2009
I've got a whole stash of old MacUser and MacWorld magazines that I've been slowly pitching. My oldest MacUser goes back to 93 and the most fascinating aspect to me is the price of storage. 20mb and 40mb drives for $800 or more! Now that really tells you how times have changed!
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Josh Wardell said 1:49PM on 1-31-2009
MacUser was one of my favorite mags, I've always missed it.
I wish there was an archive of it somewhere as I had a few of my letters published in it.
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JimRCGMO said 3:53PM on 1-31-2009
Just wondering - why (on TUAW) are you talking about Steam like it's a neat thing? They don't support Macs, and only (possibly) Intel Macs running BootCamp or another emulation program can run Steam's software. So this would hardly seem of interest for most Mac users. PC users maybe, but this is a Mac site, correct?
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profcrayzee said 9:59AM on 2-01-2009
If I have to read the word "monetize" again in a post here, I think I will puke.
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samuel said 6:17PM on 2-01-2009
If anybody has a copy of UK Future Publishing's 'PC Answers' magazine please let me know, I'm after the Bill Gates illustrations, among others, that were heavily used in the magazine at the time.
To describe them would be to say they were scruffy. I loved them!
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MB said 9:23PM on 2-01-2009
Thank you for posting. Entertaining.
I wish I had kept all my early 1980's Apple II mags. Yeah, but I also wish my mother hadn't thrown away my complete 1950-52 Bowman major league baseball card sets.
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