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

Fusion said:
Anyone remember the Microsoft Chat software with the comic/cartoon characters? So naff, but loved it at the time, speaking to random folks.
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Yeah that was brilliant,
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asim18 said:
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.
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Sounds like Eternal September in the US. Back in 1993 AOL granted access to Usenet and basically killed it when it got flooded with morons.
 
lowrider007 said:
AOL 0800 unlimited access made it a little easier to digest but overall I hated dial up, watching parts of europe push ahead with their broadband infrastructure while we lagged behind was infuriating, we should have lead the way with a fibre in the UK.

I remember getting in on the first BT broadband trials @ 512Kbps, I still have the original D-Link modem they sent me, no routers being dished out back then, I will never forget waiting so excitingly for my green light to stop flashing on the modem, and once it did the internet changed forever, that was a golden moment, I certainly do feel privileged to of witnessed and experienced the dawn of the internet and computing in general, I honestly feel people today really missed out, it was such an exciting time.
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Interesting that you consider ADSL "the dawn of the internet"
I suppose it was in a way.
And my experience was similar to yours, I live in a reasonably rural area so wasn't amongst the first to get ADSL, but you can be damn sure I was on BTs site every day checking how many people had registered interest to see if we had reached our trigger yet.
Then when we reached it, I was sat thinking, cmon then put ADSL in NOW BT :D:D
 
56k!..could never get a true 56k connection would always be around 44k on a good day.

Used to like watching my Zoom Modem on my desk, them lights were hypnotic! lol

Nightmare when ya sister used to pick up the downstairs phone and cut you off!

Only games I could play on-line at the time was Legend of Mir and Urban Terror (Quake mod)

It was a real nack playing FPS on that connection, you had to predict where the player would be when shooting! lol
 
When I was in my 20's, at home, I remember paying nearly £80 for a 56k modem and using Wanadoo, but there was still too much latency to play online games, so I used to pack my pc into a large bag, get the train to Cardiff and sneak into work to use the 2mbit line over the weekend or if I wanted to download larger than 10Mb files.
 
I started on 14.4, major issue for me was the timeout on the BBS systems and not getting to play more hack and slash..
 
mejinks said:
When I was in my 20's, at home, I remember paying nearly £80 for a 56k modem and using Wanadoo, but there was still too much latency to play online games, so I used to pack my pc into a large bag, get the train to Cardiff and sneak into work to use the 2mbit line over the weekend or if I wanted to download larger than 10Mb files.
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Hah - I worked with a guy who got kicked off a customer site as he was using their 2Mbit line to download warez and filth. Must have been about 1996. The funny thing was it was his boasting about it that got him caught and not any sort of detection by the IT dept. :D :D
 
Love the way people seem to assume that ground zero for the online experience began sometime in the 1990's. Your memory may not extend any further back but its been going on a lot longer than that.

mejinks said:
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.
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300/300 or 1200/75 where the options on my first modem. Cost a bloody fortune too.

Quartz said:
I first started online with a 300 bps modem, then a 1200/75 modem, in the early 80s. It was BBSs back then with FIDONET.
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I had a Micronet account on Prestel too. Good but pricey. Fun times. :)
 
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I was only young but I remember having to get permission to use the internet or download game demos as they would take so long. I'd get calls to the landline from friends asking me to go on windows messenger! Never forget the night a girl me and my mates fancied somehow got my number and wanted me to come online. :p
 
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JamieM said:
Oh man I remember the 2 step lag with Mir, such nostalgia.

If it means anything to you, Legend of Mir 3 has a new server opening on the 22nd December.
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Fun times wasn't it! :D

Never got around to play MIR3, was playing Lineage 2 by the time it came around lol
 
Yup, I remember it well. U.S Robotics 56k modem was the rage for gaming back then. I had some crappy 28k ISA modem playing UT with 280 ping (on a good day). Like the other poster here, you had to aim where you thought your enemy was moving to, not at them. Kids these days when they cry 'lag', they really have no clue how lucky they are.

I'll never forget the difference ISDN made though. Everyone said how much of a difference it would make, but I never believed it until I tried. After two years as a HPB, I went to a low 70 ping (better than most cable pings back then) and the difference was night and day. I was so happy.
 
MassiveJim said:
Interesting that you consider ADSL "the dawn of the internet"
I suppose it was in a way.
And my experience was similar to yours, I live in a reasonably rural area so wasn't amongst the first to get ADSL, but you can be damn sure I was on BTs site every day checking how many people had registered interest to see if we had reached our trigger yet.
Then when we reached it, I was sat thinking, cmon then put ADSL in NOW BT :D:D
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I was the exact same for every iteration of the Internet technologies. Same feeling for ISDN, ADSL and Fibre.
 
SC0TTRS said:
56k!..could never get a true 56k connection would always be around 44k on a good day.

Used to like watching my Zoom Modem on my desk, them lights were hypnotic! lol

Nightmare when ya sister used to pick up the downstairs phone and cut you off!

Only games I could play on-line at the time was Legend of Mir and Urban Terror (Quake mod)

It was a real nack playing FPS on that connection, you had to predict where the player would be when shooting! lol
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Damn! I had forgotten about that. They were fun times!

 
I was actually thinking about Urban Terror when I posted about 60+MB game patches earlier - the update for it was one of the first large downloads I did on 56K.

I remember the city map suffered from the then map size limitations of the Quake 3 engine - large map support wasn't added until later.
 
Atari said:
Wow, now THAT's some serious nostalgia right there. I hadn't given a thought to the Blobby discs in almost a decade and now I'm right back in there with random discs I'd been given by people - Golden Games, Cappucino disc, and some random MP3 CD's from a time when it would haven forever to download an album :p
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I feel sad I can't find them as there were some little-known gems on some of those kind of discs I can't find today. I remember a car game where you could attach guns to the cars.
 
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