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Discussion on: Remember phonebooks?

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Rémy 🤖

I remember very well the year 1999. It was in the first week after the release of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. At the time I didn't even know what an email address was. For some reason, my dad took me to this kind of exposition in the basement of a theater.

That's the first time I actually got on the Internet. I had no fucking clue of what I should do. I didn't even know the keyboard layout very well because I didn't have a computer. At the time in France we used something called the Minitel which was a remote terminal to display content generated server-side, through the phone line.

In this exposition I saw:

  • Computers with an Internet access
  • A VR headset which allowed you to visit a car
  • A 3D scanner which took a 3D picture of your face (you could then edit it on the computers)
  • A 3D printer which printed your face into wood

20 years later I'm still amazed by the vision those people had. They gathered a set of technologies that would take decades to go mainstream. All of that in a basement.

All right that's off-topic but that's what I think about when I read this testimony :)