Associate
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.
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.
