deskthority

I've been on the internet only since 1998, but still I miss the internet of yore :'(. Having so much people nowadays makes the ratio information/garbage rather thin... Deskthority is one of the few exceptions I know.

Started Computer Science in 1990 and got introduced. Got addicted to MUD. We played and build all day and night (at night by breaking into the university buildings and hacking their lame terminals and SunOS machines). Discovered some dial-in methods later, I think I used an ancient VAX (which I was introduced to for running a traffic jam simulation), for almost a year, dial-in with my A500 at 2400 baud like a BBS, then telnet into a UNIX machine. That was not a local call, so usually I was broke and with my phone disconnected. Then there was SLIP/PPP, and AOL, and Mosaic, and the Eternal September, and you need to get off my law now!

Whoa, the eternal September! I heard Usenet was actually something back then : o ).

Parjánya wrote: ↑Whoa, the eternal September! I heard Usenet was actually something back then : o ).

I remember my first day in college, we were getting a tour and we got to the printer room. Big ass matrix printer, and as we got there it was just finishing a pile as thick as your wrist. The guy who gave the tour looked at it, and said, oh that's for <I forgot the name>, he always prints all Usenet updates in the morning.

Hah, great story! Most of my professors still want to read everything in paper, to this day... as for matrix printers, I had one for ages, and sometimes, when I printed anything substantial, some eagles used to come near and start to talk back to it! I live near a national park.

Time to revive this thread, I think - by now total votes are 153 for 13270 members

Representing that '91-95!

I guessed correctly, I'm in the dead center of the distribution

Hey! Who joined me in the 1951-1955 category?

We must attract more elders!


All my keyboards are younger than me!


But my furniture is older!

fohat wrote: ↑Hey! Who joined me in the 1951-1955 category?

Maybe my dad joined without me knowing. You're not my dad, are you?

I'm actually really wondering what the age structures of GH and reddit/mk look like. Pretty sure there are big differences.

It would be slightly lower , they still need to have access to mummy and daddies credit card to buy them clacks

Chyros wrote: ↑I'm actually really wondering what the age structures of GH and reddit/mk look like. Pretty sure there are big differences.

There was a guy a while back who made a google survey a while back and one of the questions was on age and if I can remember correctly DT and GH were both averaging about 27 years of age while /r/MK was about 22. This would make sense as most people join forums while they are younger then stay on them as they get older, and DT/GH are about the same age. The outliers is all the old fogies DT attracts .

Edit: something which is blowing my mind right now, there are kids born in the 21st century who have graduated high-school. I guess I am an old fogie as well.

codemonkeymike wrote: ↑[…] There was a guy a while back who made a google survey […].

keyboards-f2/mechanical-keyboards-megas ... 16338.html

New here, but way past my best-if-used-by date elsewise. (19xx)

Apparently we have someone born in 2011 on here now, kinda explains the uproar in the DTA best artisan thread.

mike52787 wrote: ↑Apparently we have someone born in 2011 on here now, kinda explains the uproar in the DTA best artisan thread.

I'm not 100% sure but that vote might be from 7bot ...


... no, it isn't.

7bit wrote: ↑I'm not 100% sure but that vote might be from 7bot ...


... no, it isn't.

Maybe Cherry MX has voted?

7bit wrote: ↑We must attract more elders!

Well I'm 50 next year. D:

Since we're talking about old internet experiences, I've been online(-ish) since 1986 when I started college, which was probably the most common means of doing so unless you worked at a particularly enlightened tech company. I enjoyed those days, PDP-10s, an overloaded Vax 785 with VMS and the main mischief-maker, a Vax 8650 running Unix. By 1987 I nearly got expelled for careless internet misuse and also had my first online-to-RL encounters. Also something about X.25 but students weren't generally allowed near that as it cost real money. I also remember the days before spam!

No particularly innovative keyboards that stick in my mind though, they were mostly VT clones of some sort and a smattering of Volker-Craigs, TVI Somethings and ADM3as. Though given that I'm so fangirly about the Model Ms that didn't happen until a place I worked got some Dell Optiplexes when they went through their M phase in the late '90s.

I turned 40 last December. Still don't feel much older than 25

Glad I also got to experience VMS in all it's glory in my early Internet days!

mike52787 wrote: ↑Apparently we have someone born in 2011 on here now, kinda explains the uproar in the DTA best artisan thread.

My son was born in 2011 but I'm pretty sure he's not yet a DT member

Half-Saint wrote: ↑I turned 40 last December. Still don't feel much older than 25

Glad I also got to experience VMS in all it's glory in my early Internet days!

Ahah you'll see the reversing is aggravating with time, at 45 you'll feel like 20!

I'm turning 16 next month.

I'd expected more of my generation, to be honest.

It's a bit weird for me to know that I'm younger than most people here, but at least I'm surrounded with mature (and nice) people, which is always a good thing.

We are the oldest average among the forums. Reddit skews much younger with an average age of 17 IIRC. Geekhack is right in the middle around 23 and DT at 27 I believe.

on 05 Dec. 2017 kbdfr wrote: ↑

05 Dec 2017, 13:41

Time to revive this thread, I think - by now total votes are 153 for 13270 members

Time to revive this thread again, I think.
By now, round one year and a half later, the total votes count is 227 for 14064 members.

kbdfr wrote: ↑

15 Jun 2019, 15:58

on 05 Dec. 2017 kbdfr wrote: ↑

05 Dec 2017, 13:41

Time to revive this thread, I think - by now total votes are 153 for 13270 members

Time to revive this thread again, I think.
By now, round one year and a half later, the total votes count is 227 for 14064 members.

Interestingly, the age structure here on DT and that of my viewerbase, at a glance, seem pretty similar.

mcmaxmcmc wrote: ↑

09 Jun 2018, 13:23

I'm turning 16 next month.

I'd expected more of my generation, to be honest.

It's a bit weird for me to know that I'm younger than most people here, but at least I'm surrounded with mature (and nice) people, which is always a good thing.

Most forums skew older, from what I've seen. The advent of social media drew away a lot of the older forums users, but it also led to less younger people discovering and registering on traditional forums (which have less instant appeal as they are less app and mobile-centric, and many running on older forum software... also less addicting or "engaging" as they weren't designed during the height of gamification UX/UI trends).

Reddit is essentially one giant forum of forums, and I guess most people prefer it because it's a hub for a bunch of interests with a single signon (i.e. less friction); I'm not a fan of it because it's so big and centralized, and because it feels less personal, and the communities more artificial than forums run at the top by people who actually care and have more freedom to institute changes as needed.

I think there's a shift occuring back to smaller and more decentralized/federated chat services and forums/bulletin boards as Reddit, YouTube, Twitter et al start to constrain their platforms due to political, social, and economic pressures, though, so we may see more young users joining in the near future. Unfortunately, consumer tech in general is trending more to making computers more appliance-like and relegating keyboard and mouse use to more of a niche than in the past two decades when desktop use was growing, but plenty of people still gravitate towards or need to use desktops, and thus will demand and seek out better input devices, so this community probably won't be disappearing anytime soon.

I should write a rambley thing about keyboards and I. I'm far older than most of you folks, I'll be 60 at the end of August, but even during the early 80s I had a real thing for how all the different keyboards looked/felt/sounded, and none of them were compatible with anything else I drifted away from it for a long time but a couple of years ago I stumbled over Tom's videos on youtube and the frenzy was rekindled