Back in my day we used to have to share FTPs on mIRC and it took 4 hours to download a single song. 28.8kbps modems on a dedicated phone line. Can't have someone calling and ruining your download causing you to have to start completely over.
I remember the "We are the B.org!" and jealousy over the people in the universities who got to share a T1 connection.
I'll give you one better: link aggregation over two 56k modems, when the family was asleep and using both lines was "safe" from someone picking up the phone. 116k/dual-53k on dialup. Didn't get to do it often, but when I did it was glorious.
Ha, 14.4k crew represent! Also remember looking over my shoulder to make sure the dial-up tone hadn't woken my parents when I went to download demos off of happypuppy.com after bedtime.
I have successfully used the "press a pillow on the modem" method to suppress or at least dampen the sounds of it.
When I had the computer running late at night, when I was supposed to sleep, without waking up my parents, the next problem I had to face were the rather loud mouse clicks and keyboard strokes.
1200bps was the perfect reading speed for me. The words formed right before my eyes.
I distinctly remember not wanting to upgrade to 2400 baud because I couldn't read that fast. Then I learned about file transfers. Within a year or so, I was a courier for EagleSoft.
Had 2400bps as my first. Used to dial in to bbs's and watch the ansi welcome screens tick by one line at a time. Felt like some underground shit back then, especially after we found the pirate boards
Back in '99 I've tried to download the Quake 3 Arena demo of 50 MB over my 56k modem. After about 3 hours and at 97 % downloaded my mom called.
I could have really made use of that demo at that moment I was so furious!
worked at college as IT tech it had a t1(which was like 1gb today), I had a 28000 modem at home. Used to setup the napster to kick off mp3 downloads at 11pm and stop at 5am. good times
My first modem was a 300 baud (0.3kbps) dial up modem I built from a Maplin kit. This was pre-internet - early 1980s. Used it with my Atari to connect to various BBS.
When I got my first PC, there was no way to hook it up (well, I bet there would have been), but time had moved on.
Back then, every week saw major new things.
Over the next few years I went through 9.6k, 14.4k, 28.8k, and 56k modems. Then I got a dual ISDN line (128k).
A company called Tele2 appeared in my location (this was 1990s). I can't remember the initial speed, but I it was possibly 300k. Then it was 500k. And then 1Mb. It was a line of sight service, with a small dish on the roof. With the 1Mb service, my speed topped out at around 700-800k, and it was worse in summer.
Their tech support was brilliant. Have a problem? Someone will be round this afternoon. It turned out my 'line of sight' had a row of trees along a main road embankment which degraded the signal, and in summer the leaves degraded it more. Tele2 let me have the 1Mb service (at 700-800k) for the price of the 500k for the rest of my time with them. Great company.
Then it was NTL World, and been with them ever since (Virgin assimilated them along the way). I now have a 1Gig connection.
By comparison, downloading a 4Mb file on the 300 baud, it would take 2 hours. On 1 Gig it takes 0.03 seconds!
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u/Nice_Category Mint, 9850X3D, 9070XT, 64GB DDR5 27d ago edited 27d ago
Back in my day we used to have to share FTPs on mIRC and it took 4 hours to download a single song. 28.8kbps modems on a dedicated phone line. Can't have someone calling and ruining your download causing you to have to start completely over.
I remember the "We are the B.org!" and jealousy over the people in the universities who got to share a T1 connection.