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

Skyrover said:
The UK waited until market forces made it more economically viable and our economy has certainly not suffered relative to the rest of Europe.
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What about the rest of the world though? It's always going to be difficult assessing possible lost GDP, but being behind at the start can't have helped our cause.

The idea is that early state intervention builds a knowledge base, which you can then add to and eventually export. The military industrial complex is an example, and is one reason why Silicon Valley began in the first place. As some will know, ARPANET was a network developed for use in the American military, and was the forerunner of the internet. The World Wide Web was developed at CERN, state funded. Even before that, much work on digital communications and computing was undertaken by GCHQ and the then GPO, during and post-war. So very little private funding involved in these key technologies at all.

Ask yourself this- how many world class British software, networking, computing and technology companies can you name (and even less so that are British owned)? Obviously internet connectivity isn't in anyway solely responsible, but it's another technological and structural decision we got wrong, and I'm sure it's cost us.
 
I know nothing of the Internet before the web - got the tail end of newsgroups I suppose but am not from the era of the BBS. Was on dial up from about 1997, then moved to ADSL in 2001 when something happened and Pipex started offering it pretty cheap somehow. Skipped out the BT Home Highway thing entirely.

Been on 'fibre' (Infinity) since 2011, ready for the next step up just for curiosity's sake really.

I remember having to use a download manager to get the demo of Delta Force to download over several sessions on a 'free' weekend ISP that limited you to one hour sessions. Don't miss those days at all.
 
I'm 42 and my first experience with modems was with a 2300 baud (0.3kB/sec) modem attached to my Commodore 64. Used this for connecting to BBS and grabbing demoscene stuff. I then had a 9600 baud (1.2kB/sec) modem for my Amiga and used that for pretty much the same things.
My first experience with PC dial-up was with a 48kB modem that I used for internet throughout the 1990s. Upgraded to ISDN (BT Home Highway) in 1998.
In 2000 I grabbed the first ADSL service in the UK that was 512kbps which was an utter revelation in comparison to ISDN let alone dialup.
Speeds gradually went up until I had 200Mbps from Virgin which was wonderful. I then moved 1 mile down the road to the next village and I'm back to 8Mbps which is just horrific. No chance of getting anything faster either as BT are not interested in upgrading our cabinet for fibre (even though the exchange is enabled) and Virgin will not lay cables on our road as it's un-adopted and the owners will not allow any works. So, 8Mbps for me until we move house again.
 
First dial up we used was 28k on BBS (bulletin board systems) which came before much of the web was around. We then had Telewest dial up (Cableinet) which was quick as you connected at the full 56.6k, compared to most that would connect at 33.6-48k. Then a bit later they enabled the full cable broadband side of the network so we jumped as soon as it became available in Dec 2001 (512k) and never used another ISP since (moved out and joined VM in my own place).
 
I was a bit of a latecomer to dial up, starting with a 33k modem initially used on a BB, then Virgin.net dial up, then AOL on their 0800 fixed price trial, but when NTL wired up our street for about two years before they activated the cable modems we had a 56k modem which connected reliably at 52k! (all the wiring from the house to NTL was brand new).

Fusion said:
Here's the article I mentioned:

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

Incredible how foward thinking the top people at BT were at that time. They realised as early as 1974 that a copper wire network would be inadequate for the future.

Details how by 1990 BT had already built factories for producing parts for the fibre roll out, which were then broken up and sold to Fujitsu and HP. South Korea, HK and Japan lept ahead.

It's actually infuriating how short sighted the whole decision was. All because of dogma.
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From what I recall there is a bit that isleft out of that article, namely BT from memory offered to do the rollout in return for remaining a monopoly telecoms provider retaining full control of the network.
So it would have been BT and the cable companies running completely separate networks, no companies like Talktalk, Plusnet, O2 and Sky being able to provide services over the BT network.
 
I miss the dial-up days. My experience was as a 12yr old playing Team Fortress Classic and Unreal Tournament on a 33.6k modem. I was only allowed to play an hour or sometimes less at off-peak times as it was cheaper. We later got a US Robotics 56k modem, and I used that mainly when Counter-Strike came out. I used to play on the Barrysworld, wire play and meatyballs servers. I remember envying the LPBs (Low Ping B******s) who were usually on Cable on Blueyonder or NTL, who enjoyed the lag free bliss of online multiplayer gaming. But I suppose being a HPB had some advantages, such as from time to time being impossible to hit as my lag would make me sometimes warp. :p

I also remember taking great pleasure in having to buy PC Gamer and PC Zone magazines to get the latest demos and patches, as downloading them was always such a time consuming process. But the magazines were always a good read, and really kept me up to date with everything in game related news, as not every piece of news was found on the net in those days - there were a lot of exclusive content in those magazines.

I can also say that I did briefly enjoy a bit of ISDN. My dad needed an ISDN line installed at home for work, and I definitely took advantage of that for online gaming. This was probably my first exposure to lag free gaming. But the thing I loved about ISDN was the fact it was such a clean and consistent connection because it was digital - something which I still believe was more reliable than my experience with ADSL when it first came out.

I really enjoyed the simplicity of website designs as well. Sometimes I find certain websites today too busy looking and the essential parts tucked and hidden away somewhere in submenus within submenus, when all I want to do is click and go straight there. Then there is the still ongoing incompatibility with mobile devices that still cause navigational issues. For a period, the first mobile sites felt very reminiscent of the dial up days in the simplicity of their designs, which was an interesting throw back.
 
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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90s Internet was not golden. I would have said 2002 to 2007.
 
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. I got ADSL via the green BT frog in the mid 90s with a whopping 512/64kbps (subject to contention ratios). Now I have 80/20 Mbps. That's faster than the LAN I used to install.
 
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. I got ADSL via the green BT frog in the mid 90s with a whopping 512/64kbps (subject to contention ratios). Now I have 80/20 Mbps. That's faster than the LAN I used to install.
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Are you sure that you had BT ADSL in the mid 90s? I'm pretty sure the BT ADSL Alcatel (green frog modem) was rolled out around early 2000s and not mid 90s. I had it myself in 2001 and a lot of telephone exchanges were still undergoing work for enabling ADSL.
 
I had dial up as a kid. I remember it being truly awful. I'm still amazed by how much faster internet connections are today.

It blows my mind that my current internet connection is over 7 thousand times faster than my first 56K connection. I think it being almost 400 times faster than my first broadband connection, in the space of about 15 years, to be mind blowing alone.
 
I remember playing Quake 2 and Age of Empires online, we managed some games of C&C Red Alert as well. Quake 2 online was brilliant, capture the flag seemed awesome. Me and my friends used to call each other and play Age of Empires games, till our parents got the phone bill, it was too expensive with ISP fees and also phone bills. I think free serve transformed dial up when they got rid of the cost of the calls. Then my Dad got Blueyonder 512k and we could play Quake 3 and Counter Strike 1.3 online. I do have fond memories though of downloading mp3's at 5kb/s (3 minutes for 1mb), downloading Counter Strike 1.3 which was a 150mb patch and it taking forever.
 
Caged said:
I think this is what kicked off ADSL:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/30/bt_preps_wiresonly_adsl/

I remember the green Alcatel modem being mandated at one point, and the horrific Draytek router that plugged into it being created to work around that.
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I think ADSL really was the answer to the limitations of copper wiring. Certainly helped that as the article highlighted, that other companies helped produce other modems that could be used, which only further stabilise and improve the technology. The Fibre roll-out of FTTC and FTTP from BT is starting to change things further, but the UK still needs quite extensive implementation of Fibre to compete with other countries. I have BT Infinity myself, which is already a much better connection than ADSL ever was, but ADSL did well to work with what it had.
 
Roar87 said:
I remember playing Quake 2 and Age of Empires online, we managed some games of C&C Red Alert as well. Quake 2 online was brilliant, capture the flag seemed awesome. Me and my friends used to call each other and play Age of Empires games, till our parents got the phone bill, it was too expensive with ISP fees and also phone bills. I think free serve transformed dial up when they got rid of the cost of the calls. Then my Dad got Blueyonder 512k and we could play Quake 3 and Counter Strike 1.3 online. I do have fond memories though of downloading mp3's at 5kb/s (3 minutes for 1mb), downloading Counter Strike 1.3 which was a 150mb patch and it taking forever.
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Now, it's 9GB every 3 minutes! Well quite a bit more if you're in gigabit, but that's not available to most.
 
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