🎮 In The Beginning...
1970s-1980s
This journey started with typing BASIC programs from magazines. Line by line. Hoping for no typos. Hours of typing for 10 minutes of gameplay. But you didn't just play games—you understood them.
The First Machines
TRS-80 System 80 ZX Spectrum Commodore 64
16KB-64KB of RAM was expansive. Cassette tapes made that distinctive loading sound (and often failed). The Commodore 64 became the best-selling single computer model ever—17 million+ units.
The First "Intelligent" Conversations
ELIZA (1960s, experienced in 1980s) was a Rogerian psychotherapist simulation. Pattern matching that felt like magic. The first time a computer seemed to "understand." It asked, "How does that make you feel?"
It proved: humans want to believe computers think.
ELIZA was the spiritual ancestor of ChatGPT.
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📼 Web 1.0 Era: The Genesis
Early-Mid 1990s
The Constraints That Shaped Everything
- Connection Speed: 2400 baud modems (14.4k if you were lucky)
- Screen Resolution: 640×480 pixels
- Development: Hand-coded HTML in text editors
- Philosophy: Every byte counted
We built with <blink> tags, tiled 8×8 pixel backgrounds, and tables for layout (CSS was barely a thing). GIF animations were the original web motion graphics.
"How do we make this load fast enough that users don't click away?"
The Breakthrough Moments
- CD-ROMs: Physical media bringing multimedia to the masses. Storage that seemed infinite.
- QuickTime Videos: 160×120 pixels felt revolutionary. Choppy playback was acceptable. The fact that video could exist on a computer screen at all was mind-blowing.
- MP3 Technology: CD-quality sound in just a few megabytes. Changed music distribution forever.
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🚀 The Speed Revolution & Always-On Culture
Late 1990s
When The Web Got Faster—And We Got Addicted
33.6k modems were more than 10x faster than 2400 baud. Pages actually loaded in seconds, not minutes. Images became practical.
But the real game-changer? The second phone line.
No more "Get off the internet, I need to make a call!" A dedicated internet connection meant a dedicated internet life. Being online shifted from occasional to constant. This was the precursor to broadband culture.
The Visual Revolution
- 1024×768 Resolution: More screen real estate = more ambitious designs
- Millions of Colors: Breaking free from the 256-color prison. The end of the web-safe 216-color palette. Gradients without banding!
The Birth of Online Communities
IRC (Internet Relay Chat): Real-time communication with strangers worldwide.
- Idle Wars: Who could stay connected the longest?
- Channel culture and operator politics
/away messages as status updates (proto-social media)- The foundation for all modern chat applications
From: "How do we make this small enough?"
To: "What can we do with this extra bandwidth?"
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🎮 Gaming: The Parallel Revolution
1980s-2000s
While the web was growing, gaming was pushing every technical boundary.
Elite (1984): The Foundation
Elite created an infinite universe on 32KB.
- 3D wireframe space combat and trading
- Procedurally generated galaxy (248 star systems)
- Complete freedom: trader, pirate, bounty hunter
- Proved: you can fit the universe in a computer
Elite is the direct ancestor of No Man's Sky and Star Citizen.
The FPS Revolution
Doom (1993): Changed Everything
- Shareware distribution model
- Network multiplayer (LAN parties born)
- Modding community
- The start of the "Doom can run on anything" meme
Quake (1996): True 3D
- Full 3D engine (not 2.5D like Doom)
- OpenGL rendering
- Internet multiplayer (QuakeWorld)
- Rocket jumping (emergent movement)
- The birth of esports
💫 Personal Journey: Community Through Dedication
The 3-Week Upload
Hotline: The underground community platform. Chat, file sharing, and community before Napster. Resume-capable uploads were revolutionary.
The story: 64MB of Quake data. 33.6k modem. 3 weeks of hoping the connection wouldn't drop. Resume capability saved sanity. The community waiting on the other side made it worth it.
Quake II Requiem Mod Community: Playing with 850ms ping times. That's nearly a full second of lag. Modern gamers complain about 50ms. Still dominating through pure skill and prediction.
Learning to predict where enemies would be. The lag became part of your strategy. When everyone lags, skill still wins.
What This Taught:
- Patience: Modern instant gratification didn't exist
- Dedication: You wanted it bad enough to wait weeks
- Community: The destination was people, not just the game
- Adaptation: 850ms ping? Learn to work with it
- Skill Over Tech: Bad conditions don't prevent dominance
- Prediction > Reaction: See the future, be where they'll be
Battlefield 1942 (2002): The Seamless Role Revolution
The Innovation: Be Everything
- Start as infantry, running and shooting
- Jump into a tank, become ground artillery
- Hop in a plane, provide aerial support
- All in the same life, same match, seamlessly
Previous FPS: You are a soldier with a gun
Battlefield: You are a participant in war with agency
The lesson: Perspective switching is powerful. Agency > fidelity. Being able to choose matters more than graphics quality.
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📱 The Mobile Revolution
Late 2000s-2010s
When The Internet Moved Into Our Pockets—And Never Left
The Great Convergence: One Device to Replace Them All
- Camera: From 0.3 megapixels to multi-lens systems rivaling dedicated cameras
- Music: iPod → iPhone. Entire music library in your pocket
- Chat: WhatsApp, iMessage. Always connected, always available
- Video Calls: FaceTime made sci-fi mundane
The Sensor Revolution
Mobile devices know everything:
- Location Services: GPS in every pocket (Uber, Pokemon Go)
- Navigation: Paper maps → ancient history. Turn-by-turn directions killed getting lost
The Interface Revolution
- Physical keyboards → glass touchscreens
- Gestures & swipes became instinctive
- Haptics made glass feel like buttons
- Voice commands: "Hey Siri", "OK Google"
From: "I need to get to a computer"
To: "I have a supercomputer in my pocket at all times"
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🌌 The Dream: A Unified Universe
The Vision That Formed
Playing Battlefield 1942 and Elite, reading Ender's Game—these weren't separate experiences. They were pieces of a larger vision.
The Dream:
Seamlessly transition from Earth-bound to intergalactic context.
- Start as a soldier on a battlefield (Battlefield)
- Jump in a ship, fly into orbit
- Engage in space combat
- Jump to hyperspace, travel to another star system (Elite)
- Land on a new planet, join a different battle
- All seamless. All connected. All real-time.
- Communicate instantly with teammates across light-years (Ansible)
Why This Mattered:
- Scale fluidity: From soldier → pilot → space captain → fleet commander
- Perspective switching: Ground tactics ↔ orbital strategy ↔ galactic navigation
- Agency at every scale: Choose your impact from personal to galactic
- No artificial boundaries: Earth and space aren't separate games
Why It Wasn't Possible Then:
- ❌ Network bandwidth (850ms was impressive!)
- ❌ Server architecture (64 players was massive)
- ❌ Seamless streaming worlds (loading screens everywhere)
- ❌ Physics at multiple scales
Why It's Possible Now:
- ✅ WebGL/Three.js: Render everything in browser
- ✅ WebRTC: Real-time communication
- ✅ Cloud infrastructure: Persistent world state
- ✅ Procedural generation + AI: Infinite content
- ✅ Modern bandwidth: Stream what you need
- ✅ Physics engines: Same code handles ground, air, space
This isn't a dream anymore—it's a roadmap.
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🔮 The Vision: The Spatial Web
October 20, 2025
A second realization emerged:
"Why should the WEBSITE about virtual worlds be flat and 2D?"
The Spatial Web Vision
v0.id.au becomes a 3D explorable space. The timeline is a physical space you navigate through.
Individual concepts expand into entire worlds:
- C64 node → 1985 bedroom → actual playable C64 emulator
- Quake node → your old setup → playable Quake
- Battlefield node → war room → vehicle demos
- Elite node → spaceship cockpit → procedural exploration
The transformation:
- Reading → Exploring
- Pages → Spaces
- Links → Portals
- Scrolling → Walking/Flying
- Static → Living
The website about creating virtual worlds IS ITSELF a virtual world.
Educational Experiences
The timeline doesn't just branch into personal history—it branches into all of human history:
- Walk into Bletchley Park (1942), decrypt actual Enigma messages
- Stand at Kitty Hawk (1903), experience the first flight
- Witness the invention of the wheel (3500 BCE)
- Live the transition from hunting to farming (10,000 BCE)
We remember 10% of what we read.
We remember 90% of what we do.
The Convergence Point
You're standing at the convergence point where:
- Gaming's lessons about immersion, physics, and procedural generation
- The web's accessibility and ubiquity
- AI's creative and generative capabilities
- Mobile's always-on, always-available paradigm
...all meet in the same place: the browser, with Three.js, powered by AI.
This is not incremental—this is the jump to a new curve.
Experience The Vision
The spatial web prototype is ready. See where 50 years of computing history leads.