How could I forget? Yesterday was my 3rd e2 birthday, and I was sitting around watching Cast Away instead. "Instead of what?" You ask. Instead of telling you young uns how easy you've got it. Back when I joined:
- E2 was only 14 months old.
- The original Everything was still around at everything.blockstackers.com or .org or something.
- Cool Man Eddie was only 2 months old... awwww
- Klaproth wasn't even born!
- Writeups were insta-nuked, none of this here marked for destruction nonsense.
- Only 1 C! per writeup was allowed, which gave the autohor 10 XP. Much contention was caused by the introduction of multiple chings.
- Sensei may still have been around (just about), no-one seems to remember.
- Jeff Minter had come and gone before me.
- Wil Wheaton was also around, although I don't know his account name so don't ask me.
- Clever one-liners were everywhere - I mean everywhere. (Okay, maybe that's my selective memory, I thought they were cool).
- 50 other users was an unusual high in them thar days, provoking much catbox discussion.
- Most of the handy little javascripts and user preferences now available weren't invented. We had to work to get results! None of these (r) links or any of yer poncy "writeup header display" rubbish. There was no "User Preferences Page 2" either. Bah!
- There were a lot fewer attempts at serious fiction, so count yourself lucky. On the other hand, a "proper" story, if well-written, often provoked a lot of interest, whereas nowadays we tend to take them for granted.
- nate was still head dude for edev. It seems he had some sort of weird parsing routine for his /msg inbox, so that all you had to do was ask to be in edev and the next day you were. Also, asking not to be in edev seemed to work. Odd that.
- Many classic writeups which became memes are no longer with us... those who were around back then know what I mean.
- A lot of well-loved users have left us, too many for my feeble brain to remember. Wharfinger... we still miss ya buddy! (And your little "pet" too)
- Other stuff which I've forgotten (/msg me if you remember the heady old days)
Oh yes, those were the days. Just think, back then Gritchka had joined a mere two weeks ago... and I'm still level 3. Ah well, that's a level per year, here's to getting C! power in the year of the monkey.