WinCIM, CompuServe's Application
For those of you who have never heard of CompuServe, it was an Internet service similar to AOL or Prodigy and it was pretty pricey. The thing about it though is that I found it to be perfectly organized.
The Internet today kind of pisses me off. PHP forums have taken over, everything has gone web, but the truth of the matter is that everything got really damn complicated...and that's it.
Here's a cool article:CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0
I believe that things used to be better in a way, at least communication-wise. It's kind of like comparing Linux and OS X. You have a myriad of different Linux distributions which all try to somehow differentiate themselves from the competition, and therefore everything is more complicated, although the upside is that there's more creativity - I think. And then you have OS X - one system, a certain set of hardware and basically it just works. I have completely nothing against the development of complicated systems and other complicated stuff, I just miss CompuServe.
The forums on CompuServe were invaluable, and I even remember having some kind of an application which would go online, upload and download forum messages and e-mail, and then log off. That way, I'd save my parents a bit of cash since access was expensive. But back to the forums, not only were they perfectly organized, but you were able to find forums on almost every topic out there. And, as an added bonus, these forums also had a separate file section with drivers, or whatever else you were looking for. It was simple, and I liked it.
Now there are PHP forums with RSS feeds, Twitter, 50 ways to access your e-mail, and I currently have about 7 IM accounts. Can you say information overload? Think about it, how much time do you actually spend to organize everything?
It's kind of like with the cell phone chargers, why have a different plug for each brand? We need more industry standards. Ever since I got rid of CompuServe, I've never again come across forums organized as well as those had been. Newsgroups are a far cry.
Back in the CompuServe days, the Internet was an add-on. A sort of plug-in so to speak. It was a chaotic ghetto of the online world for me, which was quite safe before the population boom :P
And what the hell is Web 2.0 anyway? And what is Twitter? Are IM status messages not enough? E-mails surely weren't enough, and text messages sent from our cellphones aren't enough either. So now it's time to synchronize Twitter, IM, send an e-mail to those who don't have the previous two, and a text message to those who don't have access to the previous three. I seriously think it's getting a little too intense and may actually badly hinder productivity. All these new tools are redundantly connecting people.
Or...maybe, just maybe, time moves faster now and I'm just getting old. For my parents, even CompuServe was complicated. Maybe I now need a multi-core brain to process all this crap.
Just my two cents.
Here's another nice article about CompuServe for those who might be remotely interested:
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