Songfight Is Older Than...

[JonPorobil]

On June 19, 2010, Songfight will turn 10 years old. For those keeping count, this means that when Songfight's first title, "Golfpunk Drives A Cadillac," was announced...

• There was no Garageband.
• There was no iPod.
• Mac's OSX hadn't yet come out.
• Windows XP hadn't come out, either.
• There were no smartphones.
• No Myspace, no Facebook, no social networking as we now know it (not even Friendster!)
• Google was around, but hadn't yet built up enough traction to become the corporate powerhouse it is today.
• There was no Youtube. In fact, it was nearly impossible to get streaming video on the Internet.
• The U.S. Deparment of Homeland Security had not yet been formed.
• Bill Clinton was still president.
• There was no Wikipedia.
• The number one song in the U.S. was "Oops... I Did it Again" by Britney Spears.
• USB 2.0 specifications had been released, but were not available with any hardware yet.

Can you think of any other good ones?

[Hoblit]

Are you sure about perfect 10? Because that means the first LIVE get together would have been just a month or two afterward and we are on Songfight LIVE #10 this year right? I'm pretty sure it was around about a year before I joined in and I missed the first LIVE event because it was only a month or two later. So I think Songfight! might be 11 years old this year.

ALSO, I contest your claim that there was almost no way to get streaming video on the internet. I worked for a company at the time that specialized in that very thing. That is what I did. Granted, streaming technology has come A LONG WAY and is much MUCH easier today than it was back then, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 'nearly impossible'. Maybe it's just perspective.

Now on with it:

IDE Hard Drives were the standard, just having over ran SCSI. What is this SATA you speak of?

[jb]

ALSO, I contest your claim that there was almost no way to get streaming video on the internet. I worked for a company at the time that specialized in that very thing. That is what I did. Granted, streaming technology has come A LONG WAY and is much MUCH easier today than it was back then, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 'nearly impossible'. Maybe it's just perspective.

Well, that depended on WHAT kind of video you wanted to stream, right Hoblit? Certain, um, INDUSTRIES, always set the trend for that sort of thing.

JB

[Billy's Little Trip]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the first song submissions to the mighty SF mono only? If so, that's a pretty significant factoid.

[Lunkhead]

Are you sure about perfect 10? Because that means the first LIVE get together would have been just a month or two afterward and we are on Songfight LIVE #10 this year right? I'm pretty sure it was around about a year before I joined in and I missed the first LIVE event because it was only a month or two later. So I think Songfight! might be 11 years old this year.

ALSO, I contest your claim that there was almost no way to get streaming video on the internet. I worked for a company at the time that specialized in that very thing. That is what I did. Granted, streaming technology has come A LONG WAY and is much MUCH easier today than it was back then, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 'nearly impossible'. Maybe it's just perspective.

Now on with it:

IDE Hard Drives were the standard, just having over ran SCSI. What is this SATA you speak of?

According to the info in the fight archive, Jon is correct. The first fight is dated as starting 6/19/2000. You are correct that we're on Song Fight! Live #10 this year. However, according to the Wikipedia entry on Song Fight!, the first Song Fight! Live was in July 2001 in San Francisco, so it would have been one year and one month after the start of Song Fight!, not one month after.

[Hoblit]

Are you sure about perfect 10? Because that means the first LIVE get together would have been just a month or two afterward and we are on Songfight LIVE #10 this year right? I'm pretty sure it was around about a year before I joined in and I missed the first LIVE event because it was only a month or two later. So I think Songfight! might be 11 years old this year.

ALSO, I contest your claim that there was almost no way to get streaming video on the internet. I worked for a company at the time that specialized in that very thing. That is what I did. Granted, streaming technology has come A LONG WAY and is much MUCH easier today than it was back then, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't 'nearly impossible'. Maybe it's just perspective.

Now on with it:

IDE Hard Drives were the standard, just having over ran SCSI. What is this SATA you speak of?

According to the info in the fight archive, Jon is correct. The first fight is dated as starting 6/19/2000. You are correct that we're on Song Fight! Live #10 this year. However, according to the Wikipedia entry on Song Fight!, the first Song Fight! Live was in July 2001 in San Francisco, so it would have been one year and one month after the start of Song Fight!, not one month after.

Yes, I'm bad at math. I totally get it now. First LIVE fight would be 1, then now would be 10 ...which is easier than I realized ...2001 - 2010. 1 - 10. It's right there in the dates.

But there was streaming video damnit!

*winks back @ John, yes... I suppose my perspective is skewed a bit by the trend setting ways of certain INDUSTRIES.

[roymond]

George Harrison was still alive.

[Hoblit]

George Harrison was still alive.

As Richard Wright, Britney Murphy, Johnny Cash, JUNE Cash, that do0d there was a title about, etc...

[jb]

George Harrison was still alive.

As Richard Wright, Britney Murphy, Johnny Cash, JUNE Cash, that do0d there was a title about, etc...

Yeah, Spalding Gray, and Gregory Peck, who had titles in their honor, as did Johnny Cash who "Step Up" was in honor of I believe.

[Caravan Ray]

In 2000, the mean concentration of atmospheric CO2 was 369.1 ppm and an international agreement had been signed (but not yet ratified) by every major nation on earth agreeing on a process to address the issue. As it turned out, 2 of the world's major polluters chose not to ratify that treaty*.

In 2010 - the mean concentration of atmospheric CO2 is now 388.6 ppm, There is no international agreement on a process to address the issue. Meanwhile, each of the 10 years of Songfight's existence have been amongst the 12 warmest years ever recorded.



(*Although Australia did eventually, and very belatedly in 2007)

[Ross]

Meanwhile, each of the 10 years of Songfight's existence have been amongst the 12 warmest years ever recorded.

No doubt about it, Songfight! is HOT!

[roymond]

In 2000, the mean concentration of atmospheric CO2 was 369.1 ppm and an international agreement had been signed (but not yet ratified) by every major nation on earth agreeing on a process to address the issue.

In 2010 - the mean concentration of atmospheric CO2 is now 388.6 ppm, There is no international agreement on a process to address the issue.

Unlike Bill Clinton, I did my part in the 70s and 80s by not exhaling.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Unlike Bill Clinton, I did my part in the 70s and 80s by not exhaling.

+1

wait....I think....

[JonPorobil]

George Harrison was still alive.

As Richard Wright, Britney Murphy, Johnny Cash, JUNE Cash, that do0d there was a title about, etc...

Yeah, Spalding Gray, and Gregory Peck, who had titles in their honor, as did Johnny Cash who "Step Up" was in honor of I believe.

I'm not Deep Throat, but I seem to remember "Step Up" coming right around a time when we had lost a lot of rock greats in a short period of time. I recall that Octothorpe in particular dedicated their "Step Up" to a sort of collective "greats who've passed on," rather than any one particular recent decedent.

@Hoblit: cheerfully withdrawn. Still, no Youtube. Whoa!

[Sober]

No 9/11, obviously.

Dumbrella boards.

[fluffy]

[*]There was no Garageband.

Although there was Acid, which GarageBand was very closely patterned after.

[*]There was no iPod.

Other MP3 players were on the market, but none of them failed to attract the attention of the non-nerd populace. MP3 hadn't even really caught on by then yet - it was still the domain of tweaky hackers and warez pirates. Most people only knew of online music in the form of RealAudio.

[*]Mac's OSX hadn't yet come out.

Not to the public, although developer-only preview builds were available, and of course Rhapsody and NeXTstep had been available for quite some time at that point.

[*]There were no smartphones.

Not as we know them today, although the term "smartphone" was in use, in reference to Psion, the original name for Symbian. Blackberries were also around then, although they were data-only devices at the time.

[*]Google was around, but hadn't yet built up enough traction to become the corporate powerhouse it is today.

Yeah, I think I was still using Altavista most of the time then. It's funny how it's still the case that if you Google for "search engine" it finds a whole bunch of search engines which aren't Google (including Bing, which is explicitly marketed as not being a search engine!).

[*]There was no Wikipedia.

EVERYTHING2 FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!! well no not really.

Can you think of any other good ones?

Duke Nukem Forever had not yet become a running joke of the gaming press.

Half-Life was still a fairly new game.

Sega was still known as a hardware company that also made first-party games. The Playstation 2 had just come out in Japan, but was not yet out in America. Nintendo still insisted that cartridges were the only worthwhile game storage medium. They had not yet announced the Game Cube. The Game Boy Color was still fairly new.

Most PC gamers still didn't have a dedicated graphics accelerator. Stencil shadows and multipass rendering were going to be the next big thing in realtime graphics, "as soon as hardware supports it well." All realtime graphics was based on a fixed-function pipeline. OpenGL was still the future of graphics acceleration. It had just added support for multiple simultaneous textures.

The GSM cellphone network still only spoke GPRS, which topped out at 36Kbps. But this was okay, because only a select few ultra-geeky people even had data-capable cellphones. (I was not one of them. I didn't even get a cellphone until 2001, and I didn't have one with data service until 2002.)

Most people were still on dialup networking. AOL was the #1 ISP in the US. Cable Internet was only available in major metropolitan areas, and only really devoted people had that. Outside of cable Internet, a few people had DSL (usually capped at 384Kbps!) or ISDN, and the really dedicated had a T1 line. (Incidentally, even today a lot of people people who heard about this stuff back then still think that a T1 is something special even though any standard $20/month cable connection blows it away by a factor of around 10.)

College graduates in the class of 2000 still remembered the Berlin wall coming down.