Are you old enough to relate? The horrors of dial-up

mistersprinkles · 5 Nov 2017 at 06:41

I'm 34. Not old, but I'm sure 34 is old to some people reading this. If you're lucky enough to have been born circa 1995 or later, you may have never used the internet with a dial-up connection. Count yourself lucky. I have been using the internet nearly since its inception (around 1995 or so) and the first few years I used the web were with a 28.8 modem, on my grandfather's pentium 75 machine running win 3.1.

The kicker is we couldn't even take full advantage of the 28.8 modem because we were using his university (he was a professor) internet provider. This sums it up- when you were downloading something, if you got 1KB/s download speed, that was a good day. Average downloads were 0.5KB/s to 0.75KB/s and there were frequent lulls in downloads where nothing happened at all... it would just sit there at whatever % it was at for hours.

I remember it took most of the day to download win bowl which was just shy of 700KB. I can download about 40 Win Bowls in one second with my current internet connection.

I remember trying for days to download the shareware version of Quake 1 and I finally gave up and shelled out a few bucks to pick it up from a store.

A couple of years later I moved up to my own machine and a 56K modem with sprint dial up internet. This was a bit better. I could get several KB per second instead of just one, but it still wasn't fast. It used to take a few minutes to download a 128kb/s MP3 file from Napster.

The first time I used "high speed internet" was in 2001 when I signed up with Rogers @Home internet. Now I could get download speeds as insane as about 100KB/s which is what it capped out at roughly. This was the entry level "broadband" package.

Over the years I have gradually moved up the ladder to my current spot @ about 200Mb/s (25MB/s) with the same internet plan. They just jack up the speed every couple of months incrementally.

Anyways I kind of went off on a tangent there.

Curious how many people have suffered the horrors of dialup in the early days of internet and who used modems even before that with usenet and CompuServe etc when it was all text based and therefore better suited to dialup. Is anybody old enough to have used one of the old old old modems where you actually had to plunk the receiver of your (corded home telephone) on the modem?

Get out your dentures and walking sticks and lets talk about the horrible old times dialup days.

Zethor · 5 Nov 2017 at 06:52

Asl pls?

Gixer · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:14

My first adventure was with 56k. It wasn't that bad apart from it cutting out every two hours. Once I had a download manager piece of software that would continue downloading files after the 2 hour cutout things were much better. I remember having my PC connected via 56k and my brothers connected to the net through mine (proxy) and both of us playing rogue spear online at the same time. We did have to be connected to a decent server though.

FurryLemon · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:19

Pictures of scantily clad young ladies loading 1 pixel at a time..

Malevolence · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:19

I can remember 14.4 here and before that 1200 modems were being used when I was working at Michelin

mistersprinkles · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:23

FurryLemon said:
Pictures of scantily clad young ladies loading 1 pixel at a time..

I remember when I finally got internet fast enough to see the gnawty videos and not just the pictures at one horizontal like every 2 minutes. Good times.

Malevolence said:
I can remember 14.4 here and before that 1200 modems were being used when I was working at Michelin

Tell us about the horrors? I never had the (dis)pleasure of using 14.4

Gixer said:
My first adventure was with 56k. It wasn't that bad apart from it cutting out every two hours. Once I had a download manager piece of software that would continue downloading files after the 2 hour cutout things were much better. I remember having my PC connected via 56k and my brothers connected to the net through mine (proxy) and both of us playing rogue spear online at the same time. We did have to be connected to a decent server though.

Thanks for sharing

mejinks · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:27

A device where you put the handset into a wooden box is called an acoustic coupler iirc.

Try 300baud where you replace the monitor with a daisy wheel printer. Now THAT is old school.

Huntyz · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:28

Yeah I remember the days of dial up and i wish i could remove them from my memory as none of those memories are good

I used to wrap the modem in a towel so my parents couldn't hear i was going online as it was like 4p a min back in the day.

I remember trying to download a 20MB update for RainbowSix which took around 2 hours but internet explorer would keep failing the download so it took me about 5 hours to get it.

Downloading pictures was horrible and movies was a nono unless you left it downloading for several nights in a row.

In the end i went from 56k to 2Mbit and it blew my mind

AndyCr15 · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:30

Similar timelines for me. I guess it was around 95 I was playing... I was addicted to Ultima Online and was paying AOL 1p a minute for my 56k connection. I think at one point there were 4 of us in the house, all with out own connection. I regularly had bills of £120 a month (which was a lot to me back then) before they finally went to fixed rate.

In 2001 we got broadband, half meg I think, from BT. I remember watching a 3meg mp3 download and being amazed at the speed it moved. We were only in the rented place for 6 months and the sales lady had assured us we could take it with us when we move. If you remember back then this was a big no no, but she assured us we could. When it came to moving they of course said we couldn't, it took me weeks to track this lady back down, she confirmed that's what she said and they moved our connection with us.

mistersprinkles · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:30

Huntyz said:
Yeah I remember the days of dial up and i wish i could remove them from my memory as none of those memories are good

I used to wrap the modem in a towel so my parents couldn't hear i was going online as it was like 4p a min back in the day.

I remember trying to download a 20MB update for RainbowSix which took around 2 hours but internet explorer would keep failing the download so it took me about 5 hours to get it.

Downloading pictures was horrible and movies was a nono unless you left it downloading for several nights in a row.

In the end i went from 56k to 2Mbit and it blew my mind

I remember when I got 8Mb that really blew my mind at the time. Everyone was like 8Mb is so fast it's all you'll ever need!

AndyCr15 said:
Similar timelines for me. I guess it was around 95 I was playing... I was addicted to Ultima Online and was paying AOL 1p a minute for my 56k connection. I think at one point there were 4 of us in the house, all with out own connection. I regularly had bills of £120 a month (which was a lot to me back then) before they finally went to fixed rate.

In 2001 we got broadband, half meg I think, from BT. I remember watching a 3meg mp3 download and being amazed at the speed it moved. We were only in the rented place for 6 months and the sales lady had assured us we could take it with us when we move. If you remember back then this was a big no no, but she assured us we could. When it came to moving they of course said we couldn't, it took me weeks to track this lady back down, she confirmed that's what she said and they moved our connection with us.

120 pound a month!? I pay $60 a month for 200Mbit unlimited which is like what... 35 pound?
And it's good that it's unlimited because I've been known to burn through 1TB+ months when I download a lot of games.

LabR@t · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:35

56k to ISDN where you could pay 2* dial up cost to get 128k.
One of the original lpb players in quake3
Kids now days don't know how good they have it.

Huntyz · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:37

My parents refused to get ISDN so whoever had ISDN would be the host in games then we would all cry "host advantage" at the end if we lost

Sankari · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:39

You think you're old, OP? I remember the days of bulletin boards, when modems looked like this:

56k dialup was an impossible dream of the far distant future!

:eek:

Rroff · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:47

My 56k connection wasn't bad in the context of dialup other than for awhile the only way to get flat rate "unlimited" was with a 2 hour reset which sucked if you were gaming and forgot to reconnect before starting the game. I got pretty much the full possible speed - 5.6KB/s download and 80ms latency to the BT (the ISP) game servers and around 120ms to other UK game servers.

The odd day I'd connect and only be able to establish 9600baud and that was horror.

Fortunately most of my use was late evening so didn't have to fight for time on the phone line.

asim18 · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:49

Umm no. Just no.

Nothing horrific about dial up. Speed was relative to need. The huge advantage of early internet was that the proportion of intelligent people vs completely retarded people was about 100:1. Nowadays you have 1 intelligent internet user for every 1000 complete idiots. The internet is complete crap these days.

Back then the internet had a sort of entry test, in that users would have had an actual interest in it. Nowadays people are granted automatic access in fact people are forced to be online.

The real horror is the internet of today. 95 to 2002 was the golden age of the internet.

Rroff · 5 Nov 2017 at 07:55

asim18 said:
Speed was relative to need.

Wasn't that long into the days of (56K) dialup before things like 60+MB updates were released for games which would take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days to download. These days I can download whole 10s of GB games in less than an hour.

Efour · 5 Nov 2017 at 08:04

I remember that I would keep pc mag coverdisks that had Half-life patches or mods on to save on the download.

asim18 · 5 Nov 2017 at 08:06

Rroff said:
Wasn't that long into the days of (56K) dialup before things like 60+MB updates were released for games which would take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days to download. These days I can download whole 10s of GB games in less than an hour.

Speed isn't everything and I have plenty of patience. There was definite satisfaction in having to plan special large downloads, it made downloads more valuable. You had to think about what to download and the downloaded file would be more cherished, nowadays people are spoilt, download, redownload, i mean people redownload their entire steam libraries over and over again.

Fusion · 5 Nov 2017 at 08:07

Dial-up WAS horrendous. The transmission network was completely unsuited to the needs of the internet. I remember reading an interesting article about how Thatcher in 89/90 (I believe) had the opportunity to develop a country-wide fibre network, financed by the state, on the advice of BT. By the sounds of it, it would have propelled us to the top of the connectivity table, or very close to it, and given us a major headstart on other countries.

Seeing heavy state investment and "lack of competition" as anathema however, she decided against it, and we played catch up for a long time. As anyone remembers in the dial up days, we were some way behind the states and places like Sweden, with their Mbit+ connections.

Private initiative can be wonderful, but sometimes the state has to take the initiative and lead confidently. Electric vehicles and charging is another area where we're in danger of dropping behind, because we just don't think long term and don't like stumping up the cash.

Rroff · 5 Nov 2017 at 08:07

Can't say I've ever cherished a downloaded file - it was just a tedious necessity.

Fusion said:
given us a major headstart on other countries.

In hind sight that is probably an understatement - having mbit speed internet around a decade earlier would have driven hardware demand and other technology that would have given the country a serious edge and a lucrative long term as other countries bought or licensed from us, etc.