Since I was quite young at the millennium, but old enough to totally remember it, they'll come a day (hopefully) when I'm one of the few very old people in the world who "remembers the 20th century". Like how there were a small number of people kicking around in the 1980s who could remember the 1800's..
Al Gore was instrumental in passing legislation that set the foundation for commercialized internet … and all us old-timers hated it.
Nope, I was there as serial cables and token ring coalesced toward Ethernet, various telemetry and others built toward a common internet, individual well-known servers gave way to a vast directory of dozens.
Much later on, there was this minor invention of Tim Berners-Lee that brought everything together, and I was one of the coders for what may have been the first 401k management web site
I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it's so easy to be a villain.
What an amazing night. I had never known anything but Conservative government, so to see those corrupt, selfish bastards swept away was absolutely joyous in a way that's hard to fully capture in words.
Obviously the Blair government eventually completely fucked things up with Iraq, but at the time it felt like genuine liberation after years and years of sleaze and hatred.
And IMO things genuinely did change for the better in the UK with the Blair government, whether or not you agreed with every policy they had. Then Sept 11 happened, and Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world started going inexorably to shit, and it's never really recovered.
I was part of my city's biggest indoor crowd "WrestleMania 18" and was part of my city's largest outdoor crowd "Toronto rocks SARS benefit". There's really nothing like being front row while AC/DC belts out Thunderstruck, with over 600,000+ jumping and singing along.
The crowd at Skydome when the Rock and Hulk Hogan wrestled was insane too, the whole building shook
The worst part about my best concert story is that it was a Kid Rock concert. Imagine being 16, getting right into the middle of the crowd thinking "Im totally up for this" right before he opens up with Bawitaba...
You felt the anticipation build with the intro, like the whole growd just simultaneously shotgunned a whole pot of espresso. he started screaming his name. Some big ass dude behind me leaned over and shouted "Kid, when he says "Rock" jump for your fucking life." and grabbed a fistful of the back of my hoodie. That dude kept me on my feet the whole song, Ive never been more scared or filled with adrenalin my whole life.
He might be a right wing asshat now, but 24 years ago his show was epic.
I (well, supposedly) knew the guy who unleashed SQL Slammer and a small group of friends (into Ragnarok Online hacking/botting) sat around on IRC watching backbone router pings go apeshit until ISPs started blocking it. It was also amusing checking firewall logs to see whose servers were vulnerable.
I have piracy accounts older than my niece and nephew.
Had to call rackspace and get new credentials for a friend in Iraq after that massive raid.
I remember 9/11, I am a Swede and we were in school when suddenly there was an announcement of a minute of silence for the victims of a horrible attack.
It was only that evening I found out the true scope.
I was in the UK when the London bombs popped, I was in Bristol and the group I was with started talking about bombs and how we couldn't take the train back to Chippenham, I didn't get it untill we got back home and I watched the news. My parents were vacationing in Canada at the time, so I called them, letting them know I was fine, they never had time to be worried as they didn't know about the attack before I called them.
I was working my first year on a new (and frankly fantastic) job in the center of Stockholm when the dickhead stole a lorry and drove down Drottninggatan, mowing down shoppers and tourists. We put on the live news broadcast and stayed over for an hour or so at the office before people started getting home. The metro was closed, as were the busses in the center of the city as well as the large commuter trains, people just walked home or if they couldn't strangers offered others a couch to sleep on as well as dinner. My normal commute was a bus from the center of the city out to the closest bus stop to my apartment in the suburbs, but that bus was obviously cancelled. So I walked up to Stockholm East station, the nothern most stations of the central station in Stockholm, it is the terminus of the local narrow gauge railroad Roslagsbanan, it had service so I could get home that way...
I was getting ready for morning class when I saw the first plane hitting the news. I didn't go to school that day. Just sat there watching, especially after the second plane that came out of nowhere and was perfectly framed by the news cameras.
I was there. We had to go to the library if we wanted information. The magazine aisle at the grocery store is where you got your up to date info that you couldn't always get on TV. TV was like 5 channels. A few more local ones if you were lucky.
They're was nothing on TV after a certain hour. Just static, or colored bars and a buzzer. You had to wait till morning for TV broadcasts to start again.
No one had cell phones. You had to go to your friends house to see if they were home, and yell for them at their window.
To counter Metallica, Nine Inch Nails at about the same time then went on and very publicly said to steal his music because the label was overcharging his fans and he would rather they listen to it than he get paid. He then started releasing his albums for free where you pay what you want on his website. And this is just one reason I am a life long NIN fan and stopped listening to Metallica after middle school.
I remember borrowing CDs from friends and converting them to MP3s in the mid-late 90s. Admittedly I didn't really know what I was doing, so I couldn't really explain it to my friends, but ripping CDs with Windows CLI programs and amassing a huge (for the time) digital music collection was something I thought was super cool. Unlike wav files, I could actually (not always) fit a whole song on a floppy disc!
Even though I can't say I fully remember it, the beginning of yt, back when the Internet was a lot healthier than it's ever been due to the Wild West lifestyle (back before 3-4 webpages became the only place you go to).
Also, there for what I would consider the absolute best game console to come out since the beginning of the 2000s: xbox360. Also got to see what I consider the most aesthetically pleasing out of the box OS ever (W*ndows Vista)
I didn't realize anyone was capable of having fond memories of windows vista. Been using windows since 95 honestly I'd put windows vista at 2nd worst version ever, behind windows 8.
I never understood the hate for vista. Ran great on my PC at the time. When 7 came out, I upgraded and was confused because it was practically identical to vista, yet people loved 7.
I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up. Many born in 2001 and after would not understand the impact it has had on America.
I was there for the Boston Red Sox finally snapping a multi-decade streak of losing or not making it to a World Series in 2004. This is significant if you're a sports fan, especially baseball.
I was there to see the rise of social media sites that many use today.
I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up.
This reminds of the hilarious time my dad asked my nephew if he was invited to the cockpit while flying transatlantic. To which he responded "grandpa, I was born 5 years after 9/11". neither of them appreciated how hard I laughed at that.