HN Explorer

9 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] thread
nadermx
Is porn still where technological breakthroughs happen?
malfist
For some reason, blaming sex workers for "starting" the rent seeking behavior of corporations doesn't pass the smell test for me. After all porn magazines have had subscriptions since before the internet.
qoez
Remember that these are often just slop output from some writer trying to fill a writing quota
pr337h4m
new funniest satoshi candidate just dropped
Mistletoe
Men of a certain age and on the internet all remember Danni Ashe.
FrustratedMonky
It is often noted how the Sex Industry funded the internet. I wish we could go back to those times when Sex was the funding instead of Rage Bait.
hannasanarion
This is fascinating for the ways that it's wrong, like, subscription services are as old as newspapers, and early internet news sites including Wall Street Journal had paywalls at the same time or earlier.

Also this:

> Video teleconferencing, with the proto-Zoom platform CU-SeeMe

Apparently Skype has completely disappeared from the cultural memory. Video conferencing was invented in 2020, everybody.

mikestew
People were going online in the ‘90s (and using obnoxiously large phones)

Umm, the guy in that picture isn’t “going online”, he’s making drunken purchases at 2:00 a. m. via QVC’s 800 phone number. You see a keyboard attached to that “monitor”?

pan69
Back in the 90s there was a zeitgeist where people in different pockets of the world came up with similar ideas and similar solutions to certain problems. Technology hit a certain threshold that allowed for specific innovation to occur.

It reminds me of that movie "The Billion Dollar Code" [1] where some guys claim that Google stole their Google Maps idea. Whereas in reality, it's more likely that due to certain technological advances, different people came up with the same/similar idea of how to store and display maps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code