The 56k Modem Days!

Ah the days of dial up. Trying to download files before the 2 hour limit cut the connection, playing Red Alert over the modem with a mate and getting an out of sync when someone picked up the phone, the days when people actually used Yahoo.

I wonder if the next generation will look on the modem in the same way we look at the steam engine :o
 
Living out in the sticks meant that our line was rubbish. From 2000 to about 2002 it was 56k only and it was almost always a 250-300 ping. Then I convinced my parents when I was 16 to get ISDN installed and began using the same Freeserve connection with that -after 2 years of practice at 250 pings, getting a 80-90 ping suddenly made everything a lot easier and I became rather good! ... at the inevitable cost to my sleep and first year of sixth form.

We didn't get broadband at home until after I'd gone to uni in the autumn term (2004), so by then I'd already used the uni connection for a term when I came back at Christmas.

My internet went down for nearly 2 weeks a few weeks ago and it leaves an annoyingly big hole.
 
dmpoole said:
56k - you were lucky.
My first MODEM was 1440 (1.4k) and you coupled it up to a phone.
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1.4k - you were lucky. My first modem connected at 300baud, and you used an acoustic piece to connect it to the handset :eek::D
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5kbps! My 56k was pussging 3.5 average, 4 max! I remember downlaoding mp3's on Napster (old skool) and them taking 25-30mins each! nowadays im on 50mb and can download albums in seconds.

In a way i liked the old days, it made you feel "connected" having to wait while things download. When everything is almost on demand it kind of looses that feeling for me...
 
Yeah im helping my mum move house today and look what I found! :D

image016zai.jpg


Still hate the memories of 56k modems (or urm the 28-33k one my dad used to use to work from home with back when i was 5....) too much waiting for nothing, and getting a massive amount of span/spieware on the way....

Still remember the day my mate down the road became the first person in the village to get broadband, he used to be downloading "stuff" off the net all day and night (his parents hated not being able to use the phone) to his p2 gateway, it died within a week of getting broadband (downloaded too much in one go....)
 
Used to leave my Counter-strike beta downloads on during the day while I was in school. Would be so excited during the whole day! Oh how sad!
 
I remember when Freeserve started to offer their all-day service (2001 I think) where you paid a set amount per month (think it was £15) and you could dial-up at any time of day and use it as much as you liked without incurring call charges. IIRC the only catch was that you'd get disconnected after 2 hours, which just meant re-connecting. That was absolutely awesome, so great being able to use the internet as soon as I got home from school instead of waiting until off-peak rates! Also meant I could finally download some Rainbow Six Rogue Spear mods I really wanted but couldn't before because they were so big (30MB!). Playing R6 online was fantastic, really enjoyed that.

Then I moved to South Africa in April 2001 and things went a bit backwards; they didn't have a Freeserve equivalent offer over there so it was back to paying call costs again. That was damn annoying. Even had a few games of R6 with a friend back in the UK which was good fun, I can't even imagine what the pings were though. I remember I used to stay back sometimes at college after my lectures were done and use their ISDN connection (128K!) to download cars for Need For Speed High Stakes. Also used to go in occasionally with my step-dad to his office and use their connection too which was pretty quick sometimes.

The day we finally got ADSL (some time in 2004) was amazing, couldn't believe how fast it was, plus the fact it could be used all-day for any time. Only stupid thing was the pathetic 3GB cap.
 
And to think, back then a 1GB file would take 41hours of non stop donwloading to complete. Now that 1GB takes 10minutes!
 
TheVoice said:
I remember when Freeserve started to offer their all-day service (2001 I think) where you paid a set amount per month (think it was £15) and you could dial-up at any time of day and use it as much as you liked without incurring call charges. IIRC the only catch was that you'd get disconnected after 2 hours, which just meant re-connecting. That was absolutely awesome, so great being able to use the internet as soon as I got home from school instead of waiting until off-peak rates! Also meant I could finally download some Rainbow Six Rogue Spear mods I really wanted but couldn't before because they were so big (30MB!). Playing R6 online was fantastic, really enjoyed that.
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I remember that!! I can remember clan matches, everyone before the game would say 'anyone on freeserve better re-connect now cause we dont want people disconnecting half way through the game'. It all seems a bit mad when I think back. I used to have a stopwatch I think beside my monitor to make sure I wasn't about to get disconnected.

My brother only got rid of 56k last year. He only really used to browse websites and use email but no excuse with the ISP prices these days. Weirdo
 
hehe got kicked off tiscali because I used both chans of my ISDN line to connect! 128kb baby!
 
I remember one very weird day, I was sat chatting with a friend on msn and was downloading an mp3, usual 5mb. I was looking at it and it was going at 52kb/sec, i told my friend and he said it was impossible which i though so too but within 2minutes i had the song and was playing it in media player, I still have the screen shot of it to this day but I've never understood what happened.

This was all with a 56k modem by the way
 
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I miss the noise. If I hear someone using a fax machine at work, I'll stop, listen, breathe a loving sigh, and then wander off.

;)
 
First modem we had was a 9.6kbps jobbie which we used to connect to CompuServe. Soon we upgraded it to a US Robotics 14.4kbps. I vividly remember surfing CompuServe forums using WINCIM, waiting about a minute for a screenshot of a Mega Drive game to download. The package came with a bona-fide web browser, NCSA Mosaic, but I had about 16MB of RAM and my PC didn't like running both pieces of software at the same time - that, and the web seemed like a scary place outside of the walled garden of CompuServe.

Then we joined FreeServe and got a 56k modem (though it only synced at about 33k most of the time!) I was banned from using the net before 6pm after we had a couple of nasty phone bills. I remember when I downloaded a 10MB file - I think it was a Sega Rally Demo. It was the biggest thing I'd ever downloaded and it took nearly an hour. When it was downloaded, I didn't have enough space on my tiny hard drive to install it. Downloading it was such a mission that I was loathe to delete it, so it ended up in a ZIP archive spanned across about seven floppy disks :D
 
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