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

To be honest, I really enjoyed the evolution of the Internet from dial-up to broadband in the late 90s to 2000s. For me it is up there with the Ghz race with AMD and Intel. I very much feel that computer hardware and Internet technology isn't as exciting as it used to be. Also for me personally, not being able to access the internet at all times meant that I did other things. These days I tend to waste time on the Internet by accident just because it is always on and there... It is both a blessing and a curse.

I don't know if anyone else did this, but I used to spend my time after school going to my local Internet cafe doing home work there and playing games on both LAN and online there, as they had better pc hardware and Internet than I did at home. It is where I became addicted to unreal tournament and counter-strike. I also met some really interesting people there. But since broadband took off it eventually closed.:(
 
spoffle said:
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.
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Its not really 7000 times faster. Its 7000 times wider ;)

Latency has improved but not by a marvellous amount and is still, in most cases, limited by electrical/optical physics. The 'width of the band' is now much larger, but the speed at which items pass through is still the same. If you think of it like that its not that mind boggling.
 
asim18 said:
Its not really 7000 times faster. Its 7000 times wider ;)

Latency has improved but not by a marvellous amount and is still, in most cases, limited by electrical/optical physics. The 'width of the band' is now much larger, but the speed at which items pass through is still the same. If you think of it like that its not that mind boggling.
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Yeah, no. I'm literally talking about the amount of time it takes to deliver x amount of data to my computer.

1GB =

56k: 155,360 seconds

400Mb: 21 seconds

So yeah, that's a literal situation of it being 7,300 times quicker at delivering 1GB of data.

You're trying to tell me the how, and I know the how, but that's irrelevant. I still find it mind blowing.
 
mistersprinkles said:
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.

[..]

Get out your dentures and walking sticks and lets talk about the horrible old times dialup days.
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You youths don't know how lucky you were! :)

My first use of the internet was in the late 1980s, predating the web entirely. It wasn't available to home users at all at that time. I was using a VT100 terminal to a mainframe running VAX/VMS, which was text only and 1 colour only. You could have green text on a black background or amber text on a black background, but changing from one to the other required buying a new monitor. And no, I am not joking about that. Each monitor had only one colour - you had to buy one in the colour you wanted. You had a choice of two modes for data transfer rate (assuming you knew how to configure them). You could have either 300bps up and 300bps down or 75bps up and 1200bps down. And I do mean bps. Not Mbps. Not Kbps. Not even Bps. Bits per second. No web. No DNS. You had to know the IP address of the machine you wanted to connect to and the port number you could use. I had a notebook for that. And I mean a notebook as in a small book of paper to write on, not a small laptop computer. Everything was text only, of course. No point in anything else because even if you were willing to wait 6 or 7 minutes for a single image to download you wouldn't have anything to display it on. And it was amazing. I could read stuff from all over the place without having to go to the library and hope they had something relevant. I could play multi-player text adventure games! That was a thing that hadn't existed before.

So when I got dialup at home with my new (to me - I couldn't afford a new new PC) 386 DX-25 machine with 1MB (a whole MB!) of RAM and the remarkable luxury of a 40MB HDD (yes, I do mean MB) as well as two 5.25" FDD with 360KB per disk and the newfangled Windows OS, and it was 9600bps down and there was the web and there were pictures and I could use names rather than IP addresses and there was a quick and easy search engine, it was a huge improvement. A bit later, I upgraded to the brand new standard of a 14.4 modem. Even faster! Then the next gen came out and it was twice as fast! 28.8, amazing!

As for nostalgia, well, the sound of dialing up an internet connection:


was nostalgic at the time for me because it reminded me of the noise of loading a game from cassette on my ZX Spectrum
 
Taking me right back, That modem connecting sound gets me going even now :) Barrys world, wireplay :)
Quake 1
Diablo
Quake 2
Starsiege Tribes
Total Annihilation

Ive just hit 50 and feel like ive been online gaming for years.
Lan gaming was massive back in those days.
 
My earliest use of dialup was through a 300 baud acoustic coupler to the mainframe in my old man's office back in the early 80s. No monitor though. We had a DEC writer in the hallway that printed everything out (dot matrix) on reams of pin-feed paper.

I remember playing Collosal Cave and getting further than I'd been before when the ink ribbon ran out! Still remember "plugh" and "xyzzy" though.
 
I can remember having a super quick 56k modem, which was handy as at the time we had the BT friends and family free five min calls to five saved numbers. That meant doing all you downloading of emails and web browsing in just short of 5 mins to save running up a phone bill!

Dave
 
I remember when my parents went on holiday for two weeks and I downloaded an entire CD .ISO over 56k using an FTP download manager (remember them?) to continue the file after disconnects :P
 
jamesblade said:
Lan gaming was massive back in those days.
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I remember getting some 10Mb ISA NICs when my dads company upgraded to 100Mbit PCI ones, my friends and I installed them in our machines and the file transfers during LANs was so much better.

Prior to that we had been using serial and parallel interlink cables to daisy chain the machines XD
 
I had email on my speccy using a viewdata service which was a bit like interactive teletext. It had a VTX modem, which you plugged your house phone into. You called the number, waited for the data tone, then flicked a switch on the modem, and put the phone back on the receiver.

All my PC owning friends at the time, were amazed to be email from a speccy. It was a 75/1200 bps upload and download.
 
mistersprinkles said:
Edge is better than firefox. Chrome is better than both.
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Chrome has been my go-to browser ever since 2008, prior to that it was Firefox. However I used chrome on a work computer with a whopping 2GB of RAM last week. That was not enjoyable

I can remember the day we switched from dial-up to a broadband connection. I literally couldn't wait to get home from school and jump on UT99 (this was in 2001)
 
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