What happened in my birth year?

by sebkomianos • 15 years ago

12 10 15 years ago

I appreciate the effort that you must have put into this, but it was a little depressing watching the last 41 years slowly count down as the screen faded to black!

fferen• 15 years ago

Yeah, because no one watches movies in theaters or reads books on paper these days.

We're not quite that far in the future yet.

srl• 15 years ago

Nicely done.

It'd take considerably more effort, but it'd be nice if it wasn't so blatantly copied from wikipedia - it should be possible to perform minimal word-order changes without too high a risk of breaking things. (Also, forcing sentences into past tense would be nice too.)

AgentConundrum• 15 years ago

That was pretty painful to read. I'm a relatively slow reader, and that - when coupled with some other distractions around me - meant that I got behind the text crawl at times. When a picture would appear, and most of the text would get quickly pushed off screen, I would have to scroll up and try to catch what I missed while the page struggled to push me back down to the newest words.

Eventually I just gave up and let it finish before reading. It would be nice if the page could detect when I scroll up and stop writing until I'm ready to resume.

mkr-hn2• 15 years ago

Try to close it. You'll get a prompt.

mkr-hn2• 15 years ago

All the cool stuff happened in 1984.

mrpollo• 15 years ago

I gotta admit this was a good read, I always wondered about this, I read the whole thing on my iPhone and it was a good experience

jamesrcole• 15 years ago

some feedback:

- the text appears way too slowly. made it painful to read.

- "In 1978, the world was a different place." ...well, that's not really saying much of interest, I'd consider removing or changing it.

- "There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or News.ycombinator, for that matter." umm, I get the feeling this site was written with younger people in mind, because to someone born in the 70s or earlier these things seem so new that it feels ridiculous to have to explicitly point out they didn't exist then.

[Edited: formatting]

gnoupi• 15 years ago

I find that reading the Wikipedia page for the birth year is more complete and interesting.

This effort is interesting, but the black background is painful to read on for so long time. I know, years ago, pages had awful backgrounds too. The general tone isn't really of my liking, being a bit condescending like "can you imagine this didn't exist!". Yes, I can, it didn't exist when I was younger either.

That's the kind of thing which would benefit from some good narrator reading the text at the same time, though. But waiting for it to scroll like this, over the black background, is tiring. I didn't wait for the end, because of that.

beej71• 15 years ago

Very interesting presentation, I think! But it bums me out that I should be doing more!

What happened in my birth year?

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