1995 internet was born, named Web & expensive. Discovery Incubator: Texas's giant CyberCafe was launched. Now humans w crippled memory addicted to Memory chips .
Once $10,000 pr Gig, smartphones can hold 248 gigs operate at 100,000x of 1995. Cheap now! Human short term-long term memory circuits lost: Priceless. Bad Trade-out.
When Computer memory cost $10,000 per Gigabit": the cost for computer memory in 1995, when I balanced on the “Bleeding Edge pre-.COM” era of lost web pioneers. I do remember when this came out… were you born when the internet was first born? Look back through the time machine briefly and then tell me, where will technology be in 25 years from now if the world does not end in a giant CME from the sun that brings that foretold time of darkness? What will survive? Where would you be without your technology? Some have no idea and could not see if not for the cell phone interpreting reality and giving them a sense of belonging to society, Friends in Cyberspace are suddenly dead in the Cyberworld. What then? Emotions, identities, and lives will quickly end with the loss of income and a way to be important to your “Cyber-friends. The Discovery Incubator was the first space celebrating the arrival of Cyberspace in style in Austin, Texas at 2002 Manor Rd.
Bounce back to 1995 and return to October 2022 as that seems like prehistoric times when few could even access the internet with bonded ISDN lines that cost $350 each per month, two required for the in and outlines. Not just being ghosted in days, cyber-attacked, hacked, cancelled, de-platformed, and shadow or traffic-throttling as well as spying on our every keystroke, things few people thought of when I opened the first Cybercafe in Austin, Texas in 1995.
Speeds of web traffic were horribly limited, so much so that a smartphone-sized image from the Discovery Incubator Cybercafe in Austin, Tx. going online was a major logistics ordeal. This was on earth-based hardlines called ISDNs, before cell towers or multi-terabit optic cables with high capacity throughout cities, Just to reach a Cybercafe in NY City Cybercafe required all the bandwidth our internet provider had! The IP literally takes other businesses offline for 15 minutes to have enough bandwidth for a video chat in slow motion and sound out of synch, best of the days. Needless to say, such video chats seldom happened in 1996. Where were you in that time of pre-.com gamers becoming millionaires? Seems like just a few years ago but it is truly a totally different time now that a generation of kids has grown up with phones smarter and with more memory than most of the operating personal computers in all of Austin, Texas in 1996… combined. Amazing progress.
The Discovery Incubator
With all the tie-dyed patrons, barbecue vendors, art displays, and street musicians at the opening of the new multi-media Discovery Incubator last weekend, it was hard not to feel like you'd accidentally become an unpaid extra on the set of Slacker II. Although the Discovery Incubator itself could prove to be a landmark of activity, Austin's techno-bohemian community is already rallying (ironically enough) behind the capitalist ingenuity of re-packaging the obvious - Austin's Details-enforced Gen X stereotypes and the landmark business they spurred. Imagine a mall of generic Quakenbush's, Origin Games, Arlyn Studios, ACTV, Kinko's, and Eden Matrix neatly collected in a converted grocery on the Eastside and you have the Incubator.
In one visit to the Discovery Incubator, it's possible to enjoy a cup of coffee and test a new flight simulator while listening to local artists record their first record and music video. And when it's all over, one could potentially critique the whole affair on the Incubator's World Wide Web page without leaving the building. More likely, patrons will initially use the computer-by-the-hour Incubator to write college papers, experiment with new software, or attempt to self-publish books, music, or video. Notably, the Incubator's musical services are anchored by Timbuk 3-percussionist Courtney Audain's 48-track digital recording studio with a plate glass view, the East Austin Recording Studio (EARS).
"The Incubator is a full-production facility, from the music to the video and web distribution," Incubator owner and Eastside real estate broker Brad Kittel says. "There's no excuse for labels giving an artist seven cents for selling a disc. We're encouraging the creation, production, and marketing of artists that are looking to network their services and control their own accomplishments. Talent can be developed at the Incubator without bureaucracy."
On a larger scale, Kittel says he hopes the expansion of the Incubator "mother ship" could lead to "pod" sites of multi-media communication all over the city and country that would make Austin a leader in a communication distribution network capable of widespread political exchange and change. And while such lofty goals currently reside in the "believe it when we see it" phase, already the virtual reality games and espressos at the Incubator seem like a lot more than the "Kinko's with personality" description Kittel says he needed to try to lure bankers and investors into an idea that lacked Kinko's' operation history.
"The idea's so new and difficult to describe, we just have to get people in to play around," Kittel says. "People are spending two or three grand on computers they'll never use because they're scared of the technology. It's now an embarrassing stigma to be computer illiterate, just like illiteracy itself was a few years ago. We're offering a place where people can come and learn in comfort."
And with all the hippies, neo-hippies, and game-playing children getting acquainted with the technology at the grand opening, what's to say Kittel's vision of self-distributed communication couldn't actually come to fruition, when someone feels comfortable enough to create their own Slacker II from scratch at the Discovery Incubator? Even at the Incubator's early stages, the equipment and extras arecertainly in place. - Andy Langer
It is hard to imagine technology in such early and primitive stages where the costs of technology have dropped so much compared to the increase in the cost of food. Truly no one would be hungry if that were the goal and success of feeding the masses. It is possible to synthesize quality nutrition equal to what nature offers from materials that will not harm the world as leftovers from the process or by poisoning the people who consume them. The question becomes one of what is ethical to use for food that people consume, a necessary study of the consequences of using that source of food compared to other alternatives or using the means that have lasted for centuries.
Truly the loss of fertilizers, the transport, and the path to food production will change swiftly, as in the next year. I hope you are preparing to last through 2025 a chance to not just survive, but thrive based on anticipating the changes on the horizon for our societies around the world. The storm and weather are changing, the population will shift, from war or famine, the alterations that storms cause with flooding and now the fuel costs to survive in the cold. Soon the global economy will face the first of several hard winters that have historically cost the planet millions and millions of humans from the planets as the economies and societies collapse.
Governments without money, leaders who can not give the results that can be seen swiftly so the masses do not riot and tear apart infrastructure that can not be replaced after the rage, the battles, the fires, and then the suffering of those who once lived, ran businesses and had a community. Once gone, all are homeless, and many will migrate away.
If you have ever been on the Bleeding Edge of a new frontier you will understand that until it catches on and goes “Boom” as the masses jump onto the investment train. The path from the internet as a frontier to the salvage mining and building frontier is that the latter makes millionaires out of more people than technology did back when I got into the Architectural salvage business. Now, with the issues and costs of imports, transport, and building materials, as well as the downsizing of a Baby-boomer generation which is going on as an inevitable conclusion to half a century of consumerism on Credit instead of cash. If it were not for the debt structure of credit cards, most people would not own most of what they use daily, from cars, houses, and all the computers… cash only… a few sales.
The path to building tiny houses free of toxins, and imports, and intended to last a lifetime, even going off the grid as a path to self-sufficiency. I believe we will see more of this trend, evading the limits of city living for intentional communities in the countryside where such is possible. Cities are too restrictive, even to the gardens in the yards of citizens instead of grassy lawns, toxic with pesticides, herbicides, and more. What do we as a population do to change the methods of the developers, and the planners for the future? Does the massive size of poorly build houses deserve the permits to be built when the long-term carbon cost, new materials, and transport is not worth the cost to the people and society as it has no value in its lifetime longevity?
If all houses are worthless before the loans are paid off due to build-in obsolescence then what is the fate of subdivisions full of such poor quality? Easy to see the answer by driving through such areas 25 years after construction and seeing all the materials used to build most of it dissolving from the roof to the ground inside and out unless nearly all the surfaces have been replaced before then, inside and out. Sadly, this is the norm, accepted, and does not even consider the costs to the health of the people who buy new houses without knowing the consequences of the vapours, and fumes. This is suspicious in that there are consequences from using cheap materials used to create housing, and doing it by code that is written by the industry that profits from its forced usage.
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