Dead Internet Almanac

DIA

Old games, dead platforms, forgotten memes, vanished websites, and the strange little artifacts that somehow survived.

Episodes

  1. 2.94 Megabits per Second: The 1973 Memo That Wired the World

    May 28

    2.94 Megabits per Second: The 1973 Memo That Wired the World

    In 1973, a twenty-six-year-old engineer named Robert Metcalfe sat at a typewriter inside Xerox PARC—arguably the most productive research lab in computing history—and tapped out a memo that would forever change how machines communicate. Tasked with finding a way for PARC’s revolutionary graphical workstations to share a single, expensive laser printer, Metcalfe proposed a resilient data broadcast system running over thick coaxial cables snaking through the ceiling. He named his invention Ethernet, a poetic nod to a debunked nineteenth-century physics theory about an invisible medium carrying light through empty space. While Xerox executives struggled to commercialize the miracles emerging from their California lab, Metcalfe eventually left to found 3Com, bringing his networking standard to the rest of the world. Over the next fifty years, Ethernet rapidly evolved from bulky metal transceivers clamped onto thick yellow cables into the gigabit and terabit bedrock of the global internet. Today, even as we perceive our digital lives as entirely wireless, every Wi-Fi router eventually connects back to a physical wire that still quietly routes packets using the exact same language Metcalfe sketched out half a century ago. Read the original article: https://medium.com/@dia_91230/2-94-megabits-per-second-the-1973-memo-that-wired-the-world-62435f142eef Subscribe to The Dead Internet Almanac: https://buttondown.com/dead-internet-almanac

    3 min
  2. The Day Bethesda Pulled the Plug on Its Own Launcher

    May 21

    The Day Bethesda Pulled the Plug on Its Own Launcher

    In the mid-2010s, major video game publishers decided they were tired of handing Steam a thirty percent cut of their sales. The result was a deeply fractured era of PC gaming where every company built its own walled garden, and the Bethesda Launcher quickly became the most notorious of the bunch. Launched in 2016, it leveraged massive franchises like Fallout and Doom to force players onto a slow, buggy, and bare-bones client that gamers actively despised. It was a classic case of corporate ambition ignoring user experience, forcing fans to juggle yet another mandatory login and background process just to access the titles they had already bought. The standalone storefront managed to survive for six years, sustained purely by the sheer weight of Bethesda's massive gaming catalog. But the business logic keeping the lights on evaporated overnight in 2021 when Microsoft acquired Bethesda's parent company for seven and a half billion dollars. With the Xbox app and Game Pass already established in the PC ecosystem, maintaining a universally disliked competing launcher under the same corporate umbrella made zero financial sense. By May 2022, the Bethesda Launcher unceremoniously shut its doors without a eulogy, allowing players to finally migrate their libraries to Steam and quietly burying one of the most frustrating experiments of the PC launcher wars. Read the original article: https://medium.com/@dia_91230/the-day-bethesda-pulled-the-plug-on-its-own-launcher-31ecd04a2c1f Subscribe to The Dead Internet Almanac: https://buttondown.com/dead-internet-almanac

    5 min
  3. Unplugged: When 77 Million PlayStation Accounts Went Dark

    May 19

    Unplugged: When 77 Million PlayStation Accounts Went Dark

    In April 2011, millions of PlayStation 3 and PSP owners suddenly found their consoles disconnected from the digital world, kicking off the longest major platform outage in gaming history. For twenty-three days, the PlayStation Network went completely dark following a massive data breach that compromised the personal information of roughly seventy-seven million accounts. As players stared at endless maintenance messages and highly anticipated multiplayer games launched into an eerie void, the unprecedented blackout revealed exactly how dependent the console ecosystem had already become on an invisible and fragile digital infrastructure. Behind the scenes, the shutdown forced Sony to face congressional inquiries and a barrage of lawsuits after it was revealed that user passwords had been left unencrypted, shifting the public narrative from a victimized company to a negligent custodian. When the servers finally flickered back to life in mid-May, Sony attempted to smooth over the massive loss of trust with a "Welcome Back" program, handing out free digital titles to a frustrated player base. It was a bizarre cultural moment and a harsh wake-up call about data security, marking the exact moment a generation of gamers realized that buying a digital game didn't mean owning the network required to play it. Read the original article: https://medium.com/@dia_91230/unplugged-when-77-million-playstation-accounts-went-dark-eda8e579200a?source=rss-0a927ffc4412------2 Subscribe to The Dead Internet Almanac: https://buttondown.com/dead-internet-almanac

    3 min

About

Old games, dead platforms, forgotten memes, vanished websites, and the strange little artifacts that somehow survived.