Meetings and specifications. By far the biggest part of any small job.
gods I remember sitting in an RP game room in 96 we were bored so we started chatting out of character and there were so many " I’m gonna go to a college and become a web designer and took out all kinds of loans and such I seen the writing on the wall and said its a bad idea because 1 there were too many people doing or wanting to do the same thing And the precursor of sites like go daddy was happening
this is before the first bubble broke and people were getting paid insane amounts of money for homemade websites by companies that wanted to get in on it like I think it was American greetings buying up all the clip art card making sites for hundreds of thousands of dollars
Well I talked to a few people from back then about 4 and the main one said she paid a fortune to get a degree in web design and did it 3 years for a firm and got laid off and ended up going back to being an EMT but once in a while a local business hired her to make and run theirs but she had to do it so cheap that she did it just so she could justify the money and time she spent
Back then I was a CS prof on the MS Academic whatever program. So I got free stuff from them. One day I get a note from the campus PO that I had a package I needed to pick up. They wouldn’t deliver it. So I went and got it. It was this good sized heavy box. I had a really hard time carrying it back to my office. I had to stop and rest several times.
Turned out to be the whole Visual C/++ thing. A ton* of manuals and all those disks. I wanted to test it out but the idea of feeding those disks all day …
Sometimes sneakernet is just too exhausting.
- Well, after halfway across campus it seemed like a ton.
Yup, I am willing to bet that the majority of that invoice was labor. Back in 1999 $4000 probably covered a week’s worth of an IT person’s time.
My favorite search engine was AllTheWeb, now it’s nothing but a Yahoo clone.
I miss Geocities.
I miss the community on imdb.
I miss Usenet.
I don’t miss having to use Cleveland Freenet to get onto the net.
And then there was the big domain name crisis in the late 90s. Oh, no, we’re running out of domain names! All the domain names are already taken! To which the solution was to add a bunch of new top-level domains like .biz . Which of course accomplished absolutely nothing, because the same people who owned the .com and .net sites all immediately registered the .biz one, too, and redirected it. And of course it was never a matter of a shortage of names, just a shortage of creativity: The folks who wanted to create an online bank would of course call it bank.com , and the folks who wanted to create an online store wanted to call it store.com , and so on, even though no business in the real world is ever named that way.
There was also a crisis around a shortage of IPv4 addresses. About twenty years ago, I worked for a company with perhaps six sales offices around the country and each was assigned an entire Class C network range, which allows for, I think, a couple million unique addresses. Today, of course most places use private network addressing and few systems have a unique public IP address.
And the manuals. At some point in the very early 90s I was a student and had access to an academic discount on OS/2. I ordered it, and what they gave out was the full enterprise edition (or whatever they called it) that came with 50 pounds of manuals and 30-40 extra disks for a database or something like that. I don’t remember if the manuals came to grad school with me, but the disks were definitely trashed when I moved out of graduate student housing.
I missed a fortune by not being a domain squatter. I remember hanging out one night with a friend who had access to register domains in 93 or 94. At the time you couldn’t just hop on godaddy. We looked up a bunch of stuff that wasn’t registered, but the only one that sticks in my mind was xxx.com. At $20 or whatever per name, it seemed like too much at the time. Knowing the years of battling before the guy who initially bought sex.com ever got paid, perhaps it’s best I didn’t register anything.
I remember seeing, 25-30 years ago, a document from the Software Publishers Association or some other such group, with specifications for how big packaged software should be. So a game, retailing for $30-40 might be expected to come in a paperboard box perhaps an inch thick with the discs and a small manual. But a serious business application like Microsoft Office would be in a paperboard box perhaps five inches thick with a really big manual. This was all for the retail trade, because we were buying software in places like Egghead Software or Software Etc. (These were stores that sold computer software and perhaps some accessories, but mostly just the software.)
When I bought my group Sun workstations for work - Sun 3s, the last with the Motorola CPU - the volume of manuals was about equal to the volume of the workstation, including monitor.
That’s the main thing I miss—the idea that the internet was supposed to be a capitalism-free zone.
I was on a library-related listserv in the late 1990s, and one day, a rare-book dealer posted a brief message plugging his services. People absolutely FREAKED OUT! After some heated debate, the consensus was that we’d allow it just this once because it was just one guy and not some big corporation. 
I can’t remember exactly which usenet group it was. Rec.books.stephen-king or similar. But one day Peter Straub (allegedly vetted by a trusted moderator) joined our merry band, mostly to be bombarded with questions about Wolf. Judging by how he posts on twitter, I have no significant reason to doubt it was really him.
My school’s IT people had a sense of whimsy. If you logged into our network, at the command prompt (sigh, I’m almost nostalgic for all text interfaces) you could type “play cookie” and it’d spit out a random dumb fortune. It probably was something you could purchase with the software, but it was nice that our IT people gave it permissions.
My favorite graphic website was yahoo. Its front page would have like “sites” and you’d click that link and it would be lists by category of websites. Lots of early/mid-90s “humor” abounded. Lots of ascii art.
Ah, the day our school’s system crashed because someone’s parent tried to email them MS Word. Not a file. The whole program. It was also getting bogged down a lot by gigantic forwards.