17 years ago today GameDev.net was launched.

Back then there was no twitter, Facebook, or Myspace. Yahoo was just a site directory with no search. AOL was how most people accessed the internet, if they went to AOL's internet access channel at least. Modems were still popular. MP3's were a new thing. The GPU had not been born (we broke the story on NVIDIA's GeForce announcement). Unreal was new and rivaled the Quake engine with it's CSG approach vs. Quake's BSP.

The web ran on ASP, Perl, or PHP. Javascript let you manipulate strings, but neither Chrome nor Firefox existed. Netscape was still around. Firefox didn't exist. IE ruled the world. Blogs were called .plan's. Isometric was all the rage. Voxels were too slow. 1 GB of anything was huge and expensive.

Edit: And how could I forget.. mobile phones? You could dial a number and look up your contacts.

Ah, memories. Things have changed, but we're still here.

For some of us, isometric is still all the rage. Get off my lawn.

Today is also exactly 16 years since I joined. It's good to see GDnet is still alive and well (unlike flipcode, anyone remember that one?).

That was a time where OpenGL 1.2.1 or DirectX 7 were the APIs to code games for Windows. There was no Unity or Unreal Engine, you had to make the games yourself, like a real game dev. I also remember the four elements competitions (the young kids would call them "jams"). I wouldn't mind having those back again.

Where has all the time gone? I feel old now... -_-

I still remember picking up a book on game development - I think maybe one of the isometric ones - edited by Andre Lamothe and published by someone I can't quite recall (had the black and neon green covers). There was an ad flier in the back pages of the book for GDNet. My first reaction, upon pulling up the site on my shiny new cable modem, was incredulity. For some reason or another I wandered back a few months later, and lurked for a while before registering my first account.

With rare exceptions, GDNet has been an almost daily stop for me ever since.

Feels weird to think that it's been so long.

happy birthday D: