The 56k Modem Days!

I can still remember the day when work got a 14.4k modem (thinking about it now, it may have actually been slower) hooked up to one of the Macs so we could all experience the 'information superhighway' the boss had been hearing so much about. I was a little bit underwhelmed as I recall.

Contrast that to several years later by which time I'd become a complete internet junkie and got NTL to install broadband at home - that was a real OMFG moment, one of those times when you think "How did I manage without this?". Only the advent of wireless and affordable laptops has come anywhere near that since.
 
I used to get anywhere from 28.8k, 33.6k or 48k. Download speeds were never over 4.5kb/s (16mb per hour!) and pings between 350-500.

Does anyone remember Comic Chat and Virtual Chat? Twas good fun!
 
I used to play Quake and Quake 2 on a 28,800 and then a 33,600 modem and the USR modems were very expensive back then. My pings were 180 - 220 :cool: Compared to 30 - 50 on Quake Live nowadays, ahhhhhh, those were the days.

EDIT: After upgrading to 56K I got ISDN after getting fed up with timeouts and the like.
 
Aha, yes I had a Diamond Supraexpress 56e, I must have spent litrally days tweaking my 56k connection. £300 phonebills using Wireplay / Barrysworld / Jolt PAYG dial ups for better pings. I remember waiting the best part of 2 days to download Rocket Arena 3 mod for Quake 3. It was around 80mb big. :p

I remember those days fondly though, the Facebook generation didn't even know what the internet was and the online communities were much more informative / friendly. Online gaming the same.
 
Hedge said:
I used to have a Diamond SupraExpress modem, Im pretty sure that was the model, I bought it especially for playing counter strike. Was pretty fast compared to some at the time :)
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LOL - I had one of these!

'LOOK AT MY PING BOIZ, 20MS LOWER THAN YOU ALL'
 
Hedge said:
Lol :)

I had a 20mb connection at my Ex girlfriends house, and even then I would twist my face at download speeds of around 250kbs. The difference is huge.

Like Fergie says, Its only gonna get faster. Will be rather impressive when you can download a full film in a matter of minutes.

Whats currently the fastest connections active ?
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well at uni i can dl 720p (average 4 gigs) films in under 10 minutes. I peak a download rate of 8 megabytes every second. I have to go home soon where my dl speed is 256 kilabytes every second :(
 
I remember being on freeserve with a 28K modem. Ran up a huge bill chatting in the chat rooms and convinced my mum it would be cheaper to get broadband when BT started rolling it out. That must have been around 2000 or 2001. Once we got BB my mum was hooked and I could barely get on until I invested in our first home network.
 
I absolutely loved wireplay!

Haha my babysitter first introduced me to CS waaaaaay back in the day.

I remember my parents coming back from a day out to find id been on the payg dial up all day ringing up a massive bill playing cs. I think I got banned from using the computer for a week!
 
Moving to the AOL monthly-subscription-avec-freephone-number was a big 'wow' moment....the first time I'd ever surfed the web without setting an alarm first :P From then until broadband I don't think anyone was able to call our landline, ever.
 
Hedge said:
Waiting for a porno jpeg to load bit by bit
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56k back in the day, no one could phone you when you was on the net, MIRC, Netscape, FTP, newsgroups, webcrawler was the top search engine back then.

You had to use a download manager to download anything because the line would drop every so often. You had to disconnect the phone line when you heard thunder or else your modem would be fried.

Had to increase line gain to get full 5.5k download speed, lol couldn't wait till the weekends as BT offered free phone internet lines but had 2 hour cut off so you had to redial.
 
Ahh..some fond memories in the 56k era..I remember i used to hog the phone line and play this MMORPG called "Legend Of Mir" the whole day and my parents used to get extemely hacked off at me...:)

I remember trying loads of those "Make your internet connection faster!!111111one", none of them would work :P..

I also remember getting really annoyed trying to download this one file 15mb in size, connection kept cutting out every time it was about to complete :(
 
Gah, you young 'uns. I remember life before the web; BBS systems were the name of the game if you wanted to swap files with anyone/everyone; usually via a 9600 baud modem if you were lucky and had a boss who was doing the same and didn't mind the colossal phone bill :D.

I also remember troubleshooting 10Base5 "thicknet" cable connections which has made me feel really old :( (we are still finding "vampire tap" boxes as we re-cable buildings at my current job :eek:)
 
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