Just a quick post to say I am still alive and well. I have been busy over the christmas period and to be honest sort of forgot all about tilde.town.
Im suprised how much the user base has grown. I see there are loads more users now, and I am planning on going through all the homepages to see what has been happening whileI have been absent.
I hope you all enjoyed the holidays!
I have to say that I am enjoying being a member of tilde.town. I was not an internet user back in the 90s, and I missed out on all the things that I see other members getting nostalgic about, such as bbs' and personal websites. I do not remember the exact year that my family got a computer but I do remember that it ran Windows 98 SE, so I can assume it was after 1998.
Even when we did get a computer I did not use it much. Firstly the computer was expensive and my parents were technophobes, so they got worried that when me and my siblings used it we would break it (It turns out my parents would break it alot, and fixing it is how I got into computers). Secondly I was not allowed to use it for games as "It is not a toy" and "We bought it so you can do schoolwork" (I was so jealous of my friend who could play Total Annihilation as much as he wanted). Thirdly we had dial-up, and "Someone might be trying to call us" (noone ever called us).
Later I got my own computer and had DSL installed, and I played so much Total Annihilation and browsed late into the night. Later still I discovered Linux and became a big fan, however I always had the entire install to myself. I had read all about the good old days when unix was first came about, and about how many users would log onto a single machine via a terminal and share it, sending mail and doing work and so on, but I did not ever get to experience it for myself and I felt a bit like I had again missed out.
I initially heard about tilde.club from a post on Reddit and I thought it sounded like a cool idea. I did not immidiately think that it was a chance to experience the good old days, and it was more along the lines joining a community of like-minded people. As we all know tilde.club filled with users fast and while I signed up for the waitlist I knew I would be waiting a while, so I began looking for alternatives which brought me to tilde.town.
So I got an account, I got logged in, and I made a change to my homepage just so it wasn't left default. I then began to explore the newsgroups that had been setup, and I realised that the personal websites was only a small part of what a member has access to. I was amazed to see that behind the publicly accessable sites there was other activity going on, discussons on the newsgroups, chat in irc, members working on projects, and we even have a MUD to play together. It was pretty amazing to see that all this activity was all happening on a totally standard unix computer, rather than what we usually see a unix server doing such as running an instance of Apache and being left to serve pages endlessly. You can really see why the designers of unix designed it the way they did, and its impressive how even today it still works. Each user has their own home folder to work in, and we all have access to shared services to communicate and collaborate together.
It really is a great experience, especially since all we are doing is using a totally standard unix computer as it was intended. I am glad that this time round I got to experience it, and I didn't miss out.
So I am now logged in and have made my first edit. I am not sure what I will be using this site for but I will think of something. Either way, it beats looking at pictures of what people are eating on facebook all day.