Internet today what's left for hobbiests 2420

Alex

There are still parts of the Internet few people know of, and you're using one of them. ;) The Web and email are pretty much swamped with the outside world at this point, but Usenet is still more or less geek-majority. Especially newsgroups like this one: Where else would you find people asking about IBM 3330s?

If you want something really obscure, check out Gopher. It was the hypertext protocol that briefly competed with HTTP and utterly lost, sinking beneath the waves so quickly that by the Internet Boom of the early 1990s it was essentially gone. There are still computers that run the Gopher protocol, and your web browser probably supports it as well (Firefox does, Lynx does).

Linux. The open-source BSDs are very much going concerns, and still utterly geek-centric: Not a graphical wizard to be found, unless you install KDE or something. But BSDs aren't all that different from Linux.

On the hardware angle, consoles are the frontier for that now. You can install Linux on the XBox and the PS2 after some hardware hacking. This promises to get more and more interesting: The desktop world is now completely an x86 monoculture (or will be with the next generation of Macs); all the new architecture and fundamental design ideas are going to make consoles as fast and cheap as possible. Not only that, but consoles are now more than powerful enough to run real OSes and even sport fully-fledged development environments.

When the first generation of consoles based around the Cell chip is released, expect some interesting developments in the open-source hardware hacking world.

Linux is not under anyone's corporate envelope; if you doubt that, check out Slackware or Debian or the mulbreastude other one-man distros. You could even build your own distro from scratch.

Linux is being used in mainstream applications. The corporate world is both using it and selling it. This in no way makes it less hacker-friendly. Hackers still control where it goes and hackers still write the code, and if you don't like it you can still take the sources and do it your way. For once, the corporations haven't stolen anything from us.

I sympathize. It's fun being on a frontier. I hope this post helps you find some new ones.

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