In the innocent days of the early 90s the future of personal computing still seemed to be wide open, with pundits making various statements regarding tis potential trajectories. To many, the internet and especially the World Wide Web didn’t seem to be of any major significance, as it didn’t have the reach or bandwidth for the Hot New Thing^tm in the world of PCs: multimedia. Enter the CD-ROM, which since its introduction in 1985 had brought the tantalizing feature of seemingly near-infinite storage within reach, and became cheap enough for many in the early 90s. In a recent article by [Harry McCracken] he reflects on this era, and how before long it became clear that it was merely a bubble.

Of course, there was a lot of good in CD-ROMs, especially when considering having access to something like Encarta before Wikipedia and broadband internet was a thing. It also enabled software titles to be distributed without the restrictions of floppy disks. We fondly remember installing Windows 95 (without Internet Explorer) off 13 1.44 MB floppies, followed by a few buckets of Microsoft Office floppies. All pray to the computer gods for no sudden unreadable floppy.

Inevitably, there was a lot of shovelware on CD-ROMs, and after the usefulness of getting free AOL floppies (which you could rewrite), the read-only CD-ROMs you got in every magazine and spam mailing were a big disappointment. Although CD-ROMs and DVDs still serve a purpose today, it’s clear that along with the collapse of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, early 2000s, optical media has found a much happier place. It’s still hard to beat the sheer value of using CD-R(W)s and DVD-/+R(W)s (and BD-Rs) for offline backups, even if for games and multimedia they do not appear to be relevant any more.

If you’re interested in another depiction of this period, it’s somewhere we’ve been before.

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Botrush.ai is a website that offers an AI-powered Instagram growth service. With targeted, automatic actions and artificial intelligence algorithms, Botrush helps enhance your Instagram presence. The platform ensures privacy and security, using dedicated proxies and handling requests directly through Instagram servers. Botrush offers different packages with features such as organic account growth, mass story views […]

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The term ‘Social Media’ may give off a benign vibe, suggesting that it’s a friendly place where everyone is welcome to be themselves, yet reality has borne out that it is anything but. This is the reason why the US Surgeon General [Dr. Vivek H. Murthy] is pleading for a health warning label on social media platforms. Much like with warnings on tobacco products, it’s not expected that such a measure would make social media safe for children and adolescents, but would remind them and their parents about the risks of these platforms.

While this may sound dire for what is at its core about social interactions, there is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that social media can negatively impact mental health. A 2020 systematic review article in Cureus by [Fazida Karim] and colleagues found anxiety and depression to be the most notable negative psychological health outcomes. A 2023 editorial in BMC Psychology by [Ágnes Zsila] and [Marc Eric S. Reyes] concurs with this notion, while contrasting these cons of social media with the pros, such as giving individuals an online community where they feel that they belong.

Ultimately, it’s important to realize that social media isn’t the end-all, be-all of online social interactions. There are still many dedicated forums, IRC channels and newsgroups far away from the prying eyes and social pressure  of social media to act out a personality. Having more awareness of how social interactions affect oneself and/or one’s children is definitely essential, even if we’re unlikely to return to the ‘never give out your real name’ days of  the pre-2000s Internet.

Followr is an AI-assisted social media management tool that offers automated scheduling, content creation, and advanced analytics to optimize your social media strategy. With Followr, you can easily create engaging content, track your analytics in real-time, and leverage data to drive growth and innovation. The tool also offers predictive analytics and automated posting to enhance […]

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Publer is a social media management platform that can schedule, collaborate, and analyze social media posts all from one dashboard. The dashboard offers formatting tools, hashtag suggestions, and an interactive view to visually organize posts by labels, social accounts, or members. Publer’s free option lets you manage up to 3 social media accounts. It also […]

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