Thoughts of this week’s Cuil.com fiasco sent me into a nostalgic haze. .  .

Remember when –
– USENET was king, and why would you want to splinter off conversations to a million little websites?

– AltaVista was king?

– AltaVista was destroyed in an attempt to create another portal?

Alltheweb.com challenged the young Google on the basis of speed?

– floppy discs were, at most, 1.4 megabytes?  And that would hold all your Word documents for years?

– When you could cut a notched on the other side of the 5.25″ floppy disc and then write to its backside?  Instant double capacity!

– WordPerfect and Word were both in their 5.x releases?  Good word processing times right there.

– People might have actually linked to Lycos?

– Zip drives were the future, with their huge 100MB cartridges that would backup your whole hard drive for $10 a pop?