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

Mak3R said:
Yep, I'm 28 and had dial up. The AOL woman voice of "Welcome to AOL, you have.......Email" will haunt me forever I think. Also will never forget my mum shouting up the stairs "get off that computer I want to use the phone" whilst I played C&C RA2 online.
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Thought it was a guy?




Hmmm, sounds like Joanna Lumley?

 
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mistersprinkles said:
Edge is better than firefox. Chrome is better than both.
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The problem with IE / Edge is that it has features that other browsers has had for years. Edge is just the new name and more lightweight than IE, but it has still missed the boat imo. For home users, it's either Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari. IE was generally last seen in 2002/3. In the workplace though, we are still condemned with IE :(
 
Quartz said:
I'm sure I had ADSL before I left my first employer in 98. I had to give back the lovely BT v32bis modems they had loaned me.
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I had ADSL 0.5Mbit down, 0.25mbit up before 2000 - I can't remember if it was late 1998 or early 1999 now - was the first person (other than BT employees) activated on the exchange here according to the engineer who set it up.
 
Samknows shows "Enabled as of 30/09/2001" but I was definitely connected before then - I expressed interest early on and was one of the first connected once they'd finished the trial.

EDIT: Tell a lie I was getting mixed up with ISDN and ADSL installation dates in my mind - I've emails from June 2001 about ADSL being installed.
 
Somebody posted a link to a bt leased line page, in the burning of the bt van by the angry villagers.
£230 a month for a 30mb line, my dial up bill was about that a month. On another note, then Diamond Cable planted all the cable round our way circa 1996. Wasn't till 2001 before it was clicked in to operation.

Be interested to know what were the leased line costs and speeds back in about 98/9 when bt were robbing me blind on ISDN.
 
mistersprinkles said:
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?
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Old enough to have loaded games from cassette, and to have placed orders for things that asked you to "Please allow 28 days for delivery"...
So old enough for the accoustic coupler type modems, yes, but was never rich enough to afford things like computers.
 
I was doing work experience in the council IS unit about that time (a little earlier) - seem to remember they were talking of £4xxx for installation and £700 something a month for the leased line going in one of the buildings they provided support for.

EDIT: Think there were additional bandwidth charges as well? my memory is a bit fuzzy on details back then.
 
Narj said:
Did anyone ever actually pay for mIRC? I feel bad for the guy who wrote it because that must have been one of the most cracked pieces of software going at the time.
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Erm no... I do agree with you though. His name was something Khaled Bay iirc. Maybe I should try and look at how to pay him a good amount - his work helped me forge ton of memories and friends from 96 till present.
 
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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OMG i almost forgot about those old CD's :D they were my main source of games back in the day!

Using PKUNZIP or ARJ files to extract a game only to find out it was crap :D

Used to love getting the next CD to see what hidden gems it had on it.

I found this https://archive.org/details/blobby10
 
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Yep I was on dial up at uni, the only person I knew with it.

My first proper job at HSBC as a finance analyst also included going down to the basement and taking huge swathes of green and white dot matrix printer paper with the finances on it and carrying it up 3 flights of stairs to key into spreadsheets.
 
Quartz said:
We printed it out. Surely you remember ASCII printer porn?
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Yes, but I wasn't thinking of that as an image. It was, if you were the right distance from it, but I'd overlooked it when I was thinking of "image".

I remember some life-size ASCII printer porn. Printer paper was generally on a perforated roll rather than seperate sheets, so doing that was sort of like hanging wallpaper.
 
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