The 56k Modem Days!

Wiggins said:
Ah the joys of 56k and MSN Chat.

15min download of an MP3 when Napster was in its infancy.
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I was so annoyed when Napster died. I had just had my 512k cable modem put installed and was loving it. Then a week later it disappeared for good. Nooooo. Lets all migrate to the Virus/spyway driven KaZaa program.. Oh joy!
 
Wireplay was brilliant. My parents wouldn't cough up for an ISP subscription, so my only use for my 56k was Wireplay's 2.5p/min service. Quake II CTF, Jedi Knight, Air Attack, Unreal. Hard to believe it was over a decade ago.

I finally got on to the proper net in August 98 with an AOL trial, which I changed to Freeserve when it launched, and tied up the house landline for ages playing CS and Ultima Online. I still remember how chuffed I was when NTL World launched and my mum agreed to subscribe to it and install a second phone line, as they were much cheaper together than paying per minute. Adding my dialup connection to the computer's startup folder felt like a day of liberation.

Does anyone remember that terrible 0800 ISP that installed an ad banner on your desktop? Neat idea, but getting logged in was a nightmare.
 
I never used to be able to play games or go on MSN because my dad was on the main line and I'd have to proxy through his pc. At the time there was no way of using MSN through it and gaming was a no no too!
 
Frank Butcher said:
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.
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I disagree, it's much easier to get info these days I find... Wikipedia, refined search engines, many more people putting info out there ('publishing', for want of a better word, is much more accessible), flashy web-based forums like this rather than newsgroups etc. Video in particular was much harder to come by.

I think I was quite fortunate when it came to my modem connection, as I'd learnt from fellow gamers while at uni what the best type of get was (ISA slot Pace 56k) which was capable of sub-90ms pings. My father also had a pretty good phoneline giving connection speeds of 50667-53333bps (5.5-6k/sec downloads).
 
I originally had a U.S Robotics 14,400 modem then a 28,800 and then the awesome Hayes 56k V.90 modem with special firmware, it was a great modem and CS ran very well ( < 300ms) I think speeds were around 4.7Kb/s

Glad I don't have to use them any more though. :)
 
I think the best I connected at was 50.9k, this would give me a whopping 5.7Kbps download rate. :D

2 days for a naughty 700mb file ...then you find its fake, oh I miss those days :(
 
Tim said:
My dial-up NEVER downloaded at 5kb/s. You were lucky.
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Same, 3.xkb/sec max.

And it is much easier to find what your after on the internet these days, dont delude yourself Frank Butcher. It was just newer to us, and we noticed less of the rubbish that goes with it. Having said that though, there is of course much more retards on the internet these days - Just because there are far more people.
 
Yeah I was always over the moon when I was downloading on napster at 4kb/sec!

I didn't know anything about modems, technology was all mythical magic to me, I knew I wanted a better one but had no idea what to look for, and 50 quid or so back in the day was an obscene amount of money to me haha.

Played around with so many programs that claimed would give me "awesome pings" but never did jack **** haha
 
TripleT said:
Still got my Diamond Supra bad boy, that thing rocked! :D
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Thats what I had, 33.6 Supra Express :)

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