Are you old enough to relate? The horrors of dial-up
- Thread starter mistersprinkles
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 May 2004
- Posts
- 13,108
- Location
- Sunny Stafford
Did your modem not have a 3.5mm jack? If I was dialling out in the night time, I would just bung a pair of headphones in the 3.5mm jack to silence it.
I was fairly late getting my first PC. Back in 1999, aged 20, in university. Pentium II 350MHz. That was my first experience of the net too, and our halls of residence had a dual-T1 pipe @ 3mbit/s. That was 350kb/s-odd on a good day... blisteringly fast for Web 1.0.
Then I came back home for the summer hols, between uni years 1 and 2. Bought myself an ELSA 56k external modem. It was a good modem to be fair and lasted me many years, but god was dial-up slow in comparison!
In 2002, I graduated and left home for good and moved into a house-share. Signed up to NTL's medium tariff £25/month which got me a 600kbps connection which was about 10x the speed of dial-up. So was fairly happy with that. Then NTL would roll up speed boosts every couple of years.
2003 - 720kbps
2004 - 1.5mbps
2006 - 4mbps (the year of World of Warcraft!) ... NTL also became Virgin Media that year IIRC
2009ish - 10mbps
2012 - 20mbps
2014 - 50mbps
2016 - 70mbps
All on the same tariff, although the bill has crept up over the years so I now pay £35/month.
Started with the 14.4kbps as a very young kid but don't really remember using it much. My dad bypassed 28k and went straight to 56k from the 14.4k which was bliss until my sister started dating which meant 3hr+ phone calls at night and therefore no interweb. My own first Modem was a 256k Cable one in 2000-ish from C&W who became NTL and then Virgin and today my dad gets 225Mbps via Virgin Cable.
There was a nice "Kids React to...." with dial-up modems, netscape & Windows 3.1 etc which was great to see how quickly such a massive change has happened (a bit like those who saw the first planes and then 50 years later saw a man on the moon etc).
There was a nice "Kids React to...." with dial-up modems, netscape & Windows 3.1 etc which was great to see how quickly such a massive change has happened (a bit like those who saw the first planes and then 50 years later saw a man on the moon etc).
- Joined
- 21 Apr 2016
- Posts
- 1,967
- Location
- Oh Canada!
I remember netscape. Total lack of foresight and incredible idiocy lead to their downfall.
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 May 2004
- Posts
- 13,108
- Location
- Sunny Stafford
I liked Netscape and hated IE with a passion. The best browser though was Opera, although it was paywalled back then so the uptake wasn't that great. Tried AOL for a bit too, although I always found my way back to Netscape whatever browser I tried.
In 2002, Netscape became open source as Mozilla which became Mozilla Firefox after a few battles over trademark names (Firebird, Phoenix etc). This means that I've essentially be a Netscape user for 18 years
- Joined
- 21 Apr 2016
- Posts
- 1,967
- Location
- Oh Canada!
I liked Netscape and hated IE with a passion. The best browser though was Opera, although it was paywalled back then so the uptake wasn't that great. Tried AOL for a bit too, although I always found my way back to Netscape whatever browser I tried.
In 2002, Netscape became open source as Mozilla which became Mozilla Firefox after a few battles over trademark names (Firebird, Phoenix etc). This means that I've essentially be a Netscape user for 18 years
Firefox is literally the worst browser in the world IMO
28 now and did deal with dial up for a few years. I remember having to cover the speaker to stop my father hearing me connecting, having been told I'd used it enough already
The jump to 512 was a revelation and I remember being astonished at a friends 1MB connection in that web pages were just there, they didn't load an inch at a time
Pretty certain it used to occupy the phone line too?...
The jump to 512 was a revelation and I remember being astonished at a friends 1MB connection in that web pages were just there, they didn't load an inch at a time
Pretty certain it used to occupy the phone line too?...
Soldato
- Joined
- 9 Jun 2005
- Posts
- 4,698
- Location
- Wiltshire
I remember dialing someone in wales for a game of Duke Nukem3D, thats right, you had to get their phone number and call their modem with your modem....(i cant remember how we met this person) at a cost of whatever a minute and you had to agree to call the person back for the next game, they didn't once and we phoned them up to give them abuse, his mum answered and we asked for him by his screen name, she called him and we gave him a load of ****, 
but he was actually alright in the end and we had a few games over the next few weeks.
but he was actually alright in the end and we had a few games over the next few weeks.TBH, dial up wasn't that bad - it's all we had then, so nothing to compare to - in my circle at least.
My first foray, about 1997 and the first family PC - a Compaq Presario something, Pentium 2, odd shaped case and monitor with in-built speakers. Came with AOL disc, but I opted for Freeserve.
First month of using it, as a teen at college (an no job) - ran up a £480 phone bill! My late father went nuts!!! What can I say - an MP3 took a good 5+ minutes to download, and Jo Guest prawn was too tempting Did a bit of online gaming too, some BT service I think, used their own server lists; I forget the name.
I recall when a mate got the first 1Meg BB with NTL - about early/mid 2001, it flew, and he was then my new source of art films.
Edit: I recall having to carry out remote support in my second job, via PCAnywhere dial up - THAT, was painful!
My first foray, about 1997 and the first family PC - a Compaq Presario something, Pentium 2, odd shaped case and monitor with in-built speakers. Came with AOL disc, but I opted for Freeserve.
First month of using it, as a teen at college (an no job) - ran up a £480 phone bill! My late father went nuts!!! What can I say - an MP3 took a good 5+ minutes to download, and Jo Guest prawn was too tempting
Did a bit of online gaming too, some BT service I think, used their own server lists; I forget the name.I recall when a mate got the first 1Meg BB with NTL - about early/mid 2001, it flew, and he was then my new source of art films.
Edit: I recall having to carry out remote support in my second job, via PCAnywhere dial up - THAT, was painful!
I was born in '92 so have fond memories of dial-up.. bust sadly not old enough to remember the specifics of most things at the time. I do remember getting kicked off my internet connection when my dad dialed up downstairs on his computer. But getting a flat rate was a blessing rather than pay per minute.
I think we moved from 56k to 128k on Freeserve, with the ugly green modem which looked like a stingray or something! Which worked its way up through 256k, 512k and 1/2Mb.. when it eventually changed to Wanadoo I think?
I think we moved from 56k to 128k on Freeserve, with the ugly green modem which looked like a stingray or something! Which worked its way up through 256k, 512k and 1/2Mb.. when it eventually changed to Wanadoo I think?
Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2012
- Posts
- 8,368
still is imo, at least it's the one i like best of all the ones i've tried. even on android.