The year is 1992.

BYTE Magazine runs with a cover page of Is UNIX Dead?.

cover of Byte Magazine, September 1992, headline Is Unix Dead?

The Macintosh by Apple is now promoting System 7 as the next great operating system. Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in April, and is talking about the upcoming Windows NT that will make UNIX obsolete.

In October, the Amiga 4000 is released on a then revolutionary Motorola 68030 (and later, the '040) processor and capable of producing a crisp 640x480 progressive display for the first time.

Amiga 4000 MULTI-MEDIA advertisement

Heady times. The internet was still mostly relegated to academia and scientists. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy and it would be another year until NCSA released the Mosaic web browser.

Dorm rooms were illuminated with green on black terminals and emitted robotic modem noises to the annoyance of their neighbors. BBSes were the primary means of connecting to other computer enthusiasts and sharing files at an excruciating 9600 bits per second. If you had a datapac connection or a direct line to your school's network, you might even be able to get on Usenet.

Looking back, it's hard to fathom a world without Amazon and Facebook. Computers were limited by megabytes and megahertz. A 20MB harddrive was a lot of storage. Digital cameras didn't really exist yet, let alone smart phones. The earliest hand held devices, the Apple Newton and the Blackberry telephones (with keyboards!) were still years away.

I long for those simpler times now in this age of AI and machine generated slop. While the machines have grown up, and the web has become this gargantuan, distributed collection, when you get right down to it, it's still just people in here, trying to connect over increasingly noisy lines.

Can you hear it? Can you hear the modem noises? That's us.