Surprised no one has (at least so far) in this long thread mentioned Feynman's books. Those were the real mind-benders for me. Absolutely made me think differently about myself and my place in the world.
Not directly a website, but I never get a chance to talk about these so: I miss old AOL text-based games. There was an early RPG called Modus Operandi that I loved beyond words.
I miss random synchronous chats with strangers, but I think I liked them because the stranger pool was a lot less creepy. I'm not sure I would enjoy them now.
FWIW, someone I met doing random AOL profile searches in the mid-'90s and I are still online friends. We both liked the Dave Matthews Band and played varsity tennis, and this met my minimum chat requirements. Now we are both former journalists working online, dealing with bipolar disorder and the recent death of a parent. The internet might be weird sometimes, but that (and a random story of getting a web development job because someone had the wrong email address for the person they were actually trying to hire) will always go down in my "Internet wins" column.
I had TOTALLY forgotten him/his sites but holy crap. Looking that up on the Wayback Machine is a rabbit hole I don't have time to fall down today but I really want to. If I remember right, I found him in a link roulette-type thing from someone else's Geocities page.
Let me be real: I loved Geocities and Angelfire. I liked seeing what people could build (and there were some pretty crazy-good personal sites). But I think even more, I liked that everyone was there because they were either really into the web, or really into some particular topic.
I miss the concept of deep dives. Being able to take them myself, and being able to tag along on other people's, and knowing that there were a vast number of topics where I could be pretty confident that I understood about 85-90% of what could be understood about them at the time.
My golden era was the brief period where I could do ALL of the following well:
- Hardware-build a computer
- Fully program said computer to do anything I wanted it to
- Network my various devices however I wanted
- Access the internet
- Build webpages
- Play arcade, desktop and console games that, in theory, I understood well enough that I could have coded them
- And, let me be really honest, engage in some minor phone phreaking because I was a teenager and that seemed REALLY COOL
And I felt like I understood the totality of most of those things. Which, again, maybe was just due to being a teenager and not knowing what I didn't know, but the size of the domain spaces seemed more manageable.
Now, I spend all day building websites. It's a good job. I can't complain. But I can only build websites. A couple of years ago, for fun, I tried to take a Coursera networking course and I about lost my mind because of how complex I realized it had gotten. My wife is about to start the second year of her Master of Software Engineering degree and I have realized watching her learn Java that there's a whole domain there that I will never be able to understand. Forget understanding how my phone works, and forget the idea of taking apart a Nintendo Switch and putting it back together with mods like I did that classic NES. I probably wouldn't even recognize most of the components.
I sound like I'm sitting in my rocking chair getting ready to yell at the whippersnappers to get off my lawn, don't I?
I'm 37.
Please tell me I'm not the only person to feel this way at this age?
(Edited to add: I am, at least, reassured that I'm not completely alone in this by the quote attributed to physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." Poor Eugene died in 1995 and I feel like he'd have hated the 2000s.)