Using a 56k Modem in 2017! | Nostalgia Nerd

[@cardboardsnail]

I actually miss when webpages weren't bloated with Javascript, autoplaying videos, and infinite scrolling

[@encycl07pedia-]

The only thing I really HATE about infinite scrolling is when the site has a footer you can't get to because whenever you go there more content pushes it down. Like these idiots at Facebook and similar can't figure that out.

[@tziuriky86]

Totally agree. If webpages weren't bloated, servers would run more efficiently, clients browsers would use up less ram RAM and CPU, and with current broadbands, everything would load even faster. And with metered mobile connections, you wouldn't be worried of using up all your mobile internet allowance or paying big fees for the used bandwithd.

[@encycl07pedia-]

+Tziu Ricky On my Android devices I usually turn off Javascript with exceptions for trusted sites. To anyone else worried about mobile data caps, I recommend if you're just wanting to read articles to use an app like Text Browser (play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fro9.android.app.textbrowserfree). There are also some browsers that can turn off images in the settings. If you're familiar with SSH, you can SSH into a remote machine and use Lynx, too.

[@m1aws]

I used Lynx or w3m on Linux. made browsing very pleasurable, even on early cable days. Loading up Linux on a 486/40mhz at the time was a big pain. On win 3.11 the images were turned off to get some speed. If an image was to intrigue, I then turned it on.

[@technologyproductions-ye3px]

cardboardsnail remember when the new York times was a light website now its bloated as crap

[@komradekontroll]

For those that might be wondering, using the internet wasn't THIS bad back then. Modern webpages are bloated with javascript, ads, images, videos, etc. You could probably get away using a 56k modem if you used noscript on a modern machine, but some websites straight up won't work with noscript enabled, so idk

[@edwardsteinjolt3720]

True, It didn't feel that slow at all, the web pages were designed simply and with a few low res Gifs or pngs, most software was built to work offline, and to connect on demand. Only McAfee and Norton were active and would schedule their updates for late night. Yet you could play online games like Wow or EQ, hell I even played Ultima and Runescape back in the day without any issues or lag. And even online advertising was text mostly. I remember pages like Terra on my nightmarish America Online service using Netscape, even doing Napster and torrents wasn't that bad if you knew how to schedule your downloads overnight when no one needed to use the phone and the fam was asleep. So yeah everything was designed according to the Era capabilities.

[@Nicole215]

I totally agree... I wish wz could go back in that regard. The internet is now cluttered with junk.

[@EllipticGeometry]

​@@Nicole215 Bloat always seems to stay ahead of capacity, despite many orders of magnitude of improvement. I love the occasional simple web page that loads instantly and is pure content.

[@RAMChYLD]

PuraguCryostato well, believe it or not, the best compression back in those days was RealVideo. At 33.6kbps, a 320x240 8fps, 256 color video with 8khz mono audio was watchable. We weren't picky. Of course, you will also need to factor in the fact that the mainstream resolution circa 1996 was 800x600, with many of the poorer folks still running 640x480. Aside from realvideo there was also Vivo video and the likes. MPEG-1 was out of it, we needed a special decoder card to play MPEG-1 files- it's either that or the decoder is built into the GPU, most S3 cards do MPEG-1 decoding (yeah, GPU video decoding isn't new tech). You can only do CPU-based MPEG-1 decoding if you have a Pentium 120 or better. But yet MPEG was too bandwidth intensive for dial-up: a 320x240 video at 25fps with a stereo 44.1KHz audio channel took about 1.3 megabits a second.

[@Soitisisit]

@basilbrushnz lol, that's genius!

[@tncorgi92]

I once had to build a PC that would let all of our sales reps dial in and access their databases from home or on the road. At the heart of it was an ISA card with "octopus" cable supporting 7 concurrent connections, each a unique serial port with its own phone line attached. If I recall it ran on a 486-50 processor. Slower than molasses but the reps liked being able to dial in anytime, from anywhere. Every so often I would schedule "downtime" to ostensibly do updates and patches but in reality it just gave me an opportunity to play DOOM on it after work.

[@allanwilson8642]

Haha...playing Doom! I worked for an insurance company in the early 2000's and a few of my friends and I used to go in on a Saturday morning - ostensibly 'to catch up on our quotations and projections for clients' ...but really to play the old death match and ctf on the networked machines!

[@AngryHybridApe]

Oh god. All the SCSI cables? With those tiny little switches you had for addressing...damn i cant remember what they were called now. Terminate and reside. But there was two addresses. One for assigning drivers in the BIOS on the PC individually..another for LAN. the BIOS settings were 02 thru 16 or so 04 was usually taken by the video card. 03 by audio. 07, 11, 14 were usually good for video. And sometimes devices would conflict, but it wouldnt happen till you rebooted, then something wouldnt work. But i cant remember ...if i looked at a bios screen id remember, but havent had to do that in years now. Im hardly ever on a PC anymore. I do it all on my phone. I am owned by a phone. But...I'm not alone.

[@natsukage3960]

@@AngryHybridApe Yep...the addressing you're thinking about is probably the switches for the IRQ (interrupt request) . Those were quite the hassle to set up, especially with sound cards, modems and the likes... Ah...the nostalgia....

[@AngryHybridApe]

@@natsukage3960 Yes that's it. IRQs. Major rectal itches. Especially when you assign everything right and it works fine....till you reboot again.

[@bobjohnson1814]

Thats why we had 2 modems and 2 phone lines...Shotgun!

[@005AGIMA]

I do miss the dial-up sound but every time heard it, I also heard coins leaving my wallet at the rate of about 25p per minute :O

[@DavidJamesInTheMix]

I remember running up an £800 phone bill. Crazy. Upgrading to 1mb broadband seemed amazing.

[@005AGIMA]

@@DavidJamesInTheMix It's not your fault. JPG's took FOREVER to download, and you'd then just find that the "image" you'd downloaded wasn't really ...your cup of tea :D :P ;)

[@gorilladisco9108]

I used to spend majority of my salary on that :(

[@Dr_McKay]

If you want to experience 56k again, just use the internet in Australia.

[@rick92rr]

Ben hahahahaha

[@DrewberTravels]

Rural America has the same issue.

[@NihiLizTikVoiD]

Come to Mexico, you get 1MB/s as a standard in 2017.

[@rick92rr]

Precaria Black Metal Creo que lo más bajo anda en 5 con Telmex, no? D:

[@BeanieBrony1995PSQUEE]

yeah, getting 600+MBPS on bell alliant, you must just have there old shit packages, just upgrade to fibre...

[@76smyt]

Type ttttt in chat to figure out your lag time in a fps. If tttt took 4 seconds to appear, you start shooting where you think your opponents would be in 4 seconds. It took real skill to play an online fps back in tha day!

[@-throat-]

ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

[@tarajoe07]

OG Counter Strike FTW. The one that was a Half Life mod

[@critik7357]

Tttt

[@rogerswift1983]

Not that different to using the free wi-fi on a laptop in a hotel ;p

[@KevinIsSoAwsome]

Roger Swift I know. I recently got unlimited data so that is not an issue any more.

[@TheCanadianToast]

YES. I also feel your pain as well! Some free wi-fi services have slow speeds, some free wi-fi services have fast speeds. I have used free wi-fi at restaurants and hotels before, so that is how I can prove my point... :/

[@thepvporg]

Thats why they sell you TV channels in hotels, wifi is for email not video... Simplest to say, stop being tight.

[@JesseKagarise]

Crazy enough, the last hotel I stayed at had 50 Mb/s download speeds. Probably because they actually had someone know what they were doing set it up. They were even using regular old Unifi access points like I have at home, nothing expensive.

[@bagelmaster8]

+Jesse Kagarise yeah me too, but the one before THAT had a 4mb download

[@AroundIndiana]

The worst thing about dialup was being in the middle of a huge download that was going on for hours and hours, and my mom yelling at me that she needed to make a phone call lol. Download over!

[@Dissenter]

Well I had to share mine with my cousin who lived out of state, and every time he would log into his account, it would kick me out, and vice versa. Only one person could be logged in at a time, so any big downloads would be out of the question.

[@BlazinPowerz]

And then there was download accelerator for the 56k modem

[@edwardsteinjolt3720]

My dad gave up and got a 2nd phone line exclusively for the computer in his studio at our house.

[@SteveHill68K]

I arranged to have my own phone line installed, and paid for it myself. That said that was when I was in my early 20s rather than my teenage years (when the Internet didn't really exist)

[@MiguelRPD]

Lol I tried downloading psp demos using dial up. It was infuriating.

[@CrazyNinjaMike]

I used to disable images from loading automatically. It made dial-up much faster because it was essentially just loading a bunch of text (the html document). The images would have a description where the image would have been. If I wanted to see the image I would just right click the description and click "Load Image". It worked pretty well. Now, if there was a site that I wanted to read all of without any waiting (like a forums), I'd use HTTrack and download the entire site while I was sleeping (as long as the site was small enough). Then, I'd wake up and browse the offline version and everything loaded instantly. Now adays I have 10 KZbin/Twitch videos playing at the same time and still can't get my computer to choke lol

[@LongTran-em6hc]

I remember waiting for porn to load in early 2000s, 1 line of pixel at a time lol

[@juzujuzu4555]

@@LongTran-em6hc I remember downloading jpegs from BBS in the early 90s with Amiga 500. Decoding the jpeg was so hard task that you needed to wait like 30s to get the full image on screen =D But the quality was pretty amazing and in 1993 with Amiga 1200 there was already 16mil colors. I'm so happy that I grew up in the 90s and not affected by the Internet era porn.

[@iOnline72]

I remember having an ISDN line at home. 64K, BUT you could bundle 2 lines and get a staggering 128Kbps!!! (But you were charged double as well, so within a couple of weeks my parents threatened to take a way my entire computer...)

[@tactileslut]

The workaround was centrex ISDN, in the US: The line was set up as a business extension and could connect to other extensions of the same business (your ISP) without incurring charges.

[@xmaverickhunterkx]

Yeah, a friend of mine had that. It was just too expensive to make sense but damn I wanted it haha.

[@BoloH.]

Oh yes. Modern freemium games are cheap as muck when compared to Quake 2 DM.

[@chadcastagana9181]

You could get the same results with PeoplePC.com. The software for this ISP allowed you to set the quality or definition of the pictures you were downloading.

[@e1woqf]

Haha, I had the same. Later my first DSL had 768Kbps. And now I have Cable with 400Mbps.

[@SMlFFY85]

There are many things I miss about the 90s, it's connection speed is not one of them.

[@EberKlaushartinger]

The Pages haven't been so overloaded then, so the Speed back then was okay.

[@cyrfung]

Watching porn back then involved waiting for 100KB pictures to load after carefully selecting from the small thumbnails. The anticipation while the head was loaded and the body was still loading was intense.

[@CommodoreFan64]

cyrfung that's why I was an early adopter of Opera Browser(you actually had to pay for the full version back then) as it loaded jpeg pictures faster then any other browser at the time on dial up. lol!

[@boomstick900]

Be kind. Please rewind.

[@BilisNegra]

@@EberKlaushartinger It wasn't, actually. However much pages can be somewhat bloated these days, you do not actually have to endure any serious waiting for them to load, while back then anything beyond text-only stuff did make you exercise the virtue of patience.

[@bashbrannigan]

During this era, meant people tended to use Bulletin Boards. The BBS worked perfectly fine with a 56 k modem.

[@plaknas_games]

I was just here to hear the sweet dial-up sound......

[@geraldhenrickson7472]

Yes...me too. That takes me back just like the smell of Noxema skin creme. Or the sound of a quiet Harley Davidson. Or the colorful NBC Peacock on televison. Oh the good old days. Wait...no cell phone, no desktop,no Pandora...never mind.

[@Mephilis78]

I miss it, but just the sound, not the performance.

[@To-mos]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/l5PEoXmAg5uaotE

[@Tigerman1138]

Tomos Halsey I was going to link to the SAME PAGE :)

[@BilisNegra]

It's "sweet" because of nostalgia, but it was actually as easy on your ears as barbed wire on your fingers, especially with some modem models with absurdly loud default volume levels back them.

[@Fazeof1p]

I remember using a 56K dialup to do all my internet browsing and online gaming back in high school. Had to chat with exgirlfriends on AIM and MSN way late at night because the other siblings and parents wanted to use the phone. Ah those were the days... I think my parents still use Dialup to this day, which is odd since its now 2017 and everybody uses broadband. The moment I got a PC with DSL back in 2005 was surreal. Having lived with Dialup for a good 8-9 years and then suddenly switching to an internet connection that doesnt take 50 years for a page to load was like... blew my fucking mind.

[@MrVidification]

and no longer being charged per minute with £200+ phone bills after playing Sega Dreamcast

[@Amokra]

I remember that had a blow out with the phone company about that bill turns out the dial service was monthly connect and the data was a per something fee

[@Meekerextreme]

I remember an aerospace company I was CIO at they were still using 56K for the whole office I got that changed to DSL at like 2MB or some shit. They didn't want to spend the money for a T1 line. Can you imagine an office sharing 56K it was crazy.

[@treepoint141]

Nearly as bad as waiting for a C64 game to load. Damn people had patience back then.

[@Eikei]

There'd be like an 'outgoing emails queue' all day I guess, haha.

[@LilMissMurder3409]

"...rather than the 10p per minute, which my parents discovered to their horror back in 1997" LOL! You described it perfectly!

[@pp37903]

The Internet in the 90s was all bad poetry and animated GIFs of flames.

[@MrVitalic85]

pp37903 and weird colors palet and of course midi tunes 🤘

[@xedalpha1]

Rock on Geocities!

[@AroundIndiana]

Don't forget the "Under Construction" page on people's websites that they started and never finished

[@rockets4kids]

I remember when 1200bps was a big deal. And then when 2400bps was a big deal. And then when 14.4k was a big deal. 56k was just absolutely astounding. Thanks for making me feel positively ancient.

[@khx73]

I started with 300 bps.. and up from there as you said. I remember hearing about 9600 bps in those days.. that was like the holy grail..no one but no one had that except business and maybe some rich people.

[@stargazer7644]

I went through the whole process too. I started with a 300 baud modem and a used $30 dumb terminal - didn't even have a computer. 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, 56k. I remember when v.42bis come out - oh that was awesome. Error correcting and compressing modems. You wouldn't lose your connection anymore when someone picked up the phone.

[@chicken636]

rockets4kids I started out with 14.4k and went from there. Kids these days with their mobile LTE connections are so spoiled.

[@Fazeof1p]

I remember getting a PC with a 56K modem when I was a kid. It was all I had for like 8 years until I moved out. The moment I got DSL was like surreal after dealing with Dialup for that many years.

[@RonJohn63]

Kids... I remember when 300 baud *acoustic* modems were the best you could get

[@TwiggehTV]

YOU CUT OUT THE DIALUP SOUND! WHAT IS THIS BLASPHEMY!?

[@NamiHeartilly]

I'm pretty sure it's just because it connected quickly.

[@NamiHeartilly]

@- hey_dude1 - lol, I used to have dial-up. The longer it takes to connect, the more noises you hear.

[@acmenipponair]

Dial Up in this day should connect really fast, as the bandwidth of the lines to establish the connection are much faster than in the 1990s. Don't forget, that the servers connecting us are much faster. I remember in the 90s, there it took 10 seconds just to dial up my grandmother... the number was 5 digits long and it was in the same town! Nowadays I press a button and even with mobile her phone rings in 2 seconds. Also, the dial up servers of the dial up companies are much faster. And: There are not so many people on the telephone line nowadays as in the 90s, so routing a free line is much easier for the computers (also the modern telephone lines are splitted from the internet, only on the last mile you have internet and telephone on the same line, but different frequencies). And also: When nowadays the service computer of your provider hears the typical electronic sound via telephone, it switches the line to digital immediately. And from then on you don't hear anymore, as the computers then don't communicate via listenable frequencies anymore ;)

[@wilfridtaylor]

The sound was actually the sound of the internet cat's meowing messages to each other. Now we have bigger pipes they can carry the packets down the pipes directly which is why it's faster.

[@someguy4915]

@@NamiHeartilly The noises are not just for entertainment value, they actually convey the data needed to connect so you cannot skip parts of it by connecting quickly, those parts may be transmitted quicker than a slow connection but never so fast you cannot make out the noises. The longer a connection attempt takes, the longer both sides will be sending and receiving signals, which make those noises, much like the longer you talk to someone the more is said. Fun technology, glad it's long been replaced by much better alternatives though.

[@aaron_d_henderson1984]

yeah i remember when 56k was the "best" modem you could get in the 90s... ofc like some pointed out, the internet was a bit different at the time: smaller resolutions, smaller file sizes, and good luck getting audio or a video to download and not be a chore waiting on one file haha

[@dharkbizkit]

its great that you mention that websites have changed from "light weight images" to "complex pages with big images". many people display 56k as a pain by meassuring it against the modern web. but things used to be different. dont get me wrong, 56k was never really fast but everyday websites loaded in like 10 seconds and didnt take minutes

[@TexasCat99]

56k modem? Whatever. Some of us started with 300 baud modem. 300! you can read the text faster than win over the phone line... It was that slow. 1200 was a godsend comparison. I think I paid 150 bucks for that back in 1987. Then I got 2400 for my Amiga a year or so later.

[@Tigerman1138]

TexasCat99 okay!! I just lost my crown, I yield to you. I had a 2400-baud. Brother was slick with a 14.4-when that was fast.

[@TheB1gduk]

You used to dial up bulletin boards around the country and watch the CEEFAX style landing page draw itself across the screen. I think the slightly younger generation needs to watch "War Games" and watch the dial up and results screens, that was 300/1200 but devices then standardised on the rapid 9600 8N1, many devices even today use this standard for management. Those were the days computing was fun for me with the sense of mystery.

[@jeremybrown3592]

oh hell yeah. the free 300 baud for c64 that came with QuantumLink

[@GraveUypo]

i started at 14400 :O

[@Saboteur709]

I started with 300 baud in the very early eighties.

[@Slaxbox]

My washer made modem noises the other day as it was draining water. And now this video shows up. It's a conspiracy. 56k is coming back! AAAAA!

[@thebestspork]

LG?

[@MrTherandomvidsguy]

Slaxbox my LG washer don't make those noises. it just sings

[@MosoKaiser]

TheDude Damn that profile picture! I think I mustn't have been the only one to blow on my monitor to get rid of that hair... :D

[@DukeOfKidderminster]

Welcome to the world when net neutrality is killed off.

[@goytabr]

It's because your washer is sending back to its manufacturer everything about your washing patterns, what's your favorite underwear color, what brand of soap you use, etc., but the Internet of Things is still in its infancy and is not yet very fast...

[@MilitantGrunt]

Some might say using ADSL in 2017 is nostalgic...

[@NeighborSenpai]

I work in a call center, half of my country is using ADSL for internet and they are still connected to the phone output (not a problem today since no one really uses phone lines XD), although ADSL can really get you only up to 15Mbps VDSL technology which uses same cables but faster can get up to 100Mbps which isn't bad

[@jamminjim1208]

I think he is thinking if ISDN

[@f_for_freedom2492]

That's no nostalgia because I live in France and i'm still connected to internet via Adsl even when I was in Paris we had optic fiber only in 2017

[@alexn8219]

@Kernelpickle Be happy with what you have

[@lolol-real8752]

Most of my country's population still uses ADSL

[@M3DooM]

Good old times, I remember making websites back then with images as small as possible so they would load fast! The times of the rotating text gifs in a funny font 😅

[@Shotblur]

Ironically, with modern compression and support for vector rendering, we can make web pages smaller and faster than ever...but we don't, because that's not where the money is.

[@RamonCallMeRay]

lmao.. wow i actually remember waiting this long for a webpage to open.. ah the kids nowadays wouldnt even have the patience to wait for dial up

[@stimpsonjcat26]

Neither did the kids back then. That is why we went outside.

[@rschock22]

Dude, I remember when I wanted to burn a music cd I had to queue that shit up before I went to bed so I could have some new tunes to rock in my car on the way to school the next day. It took that long. God help me if there was a buffering problem with the burner while I slept. No new jams...=(

[@BilisNegra]

Today is even worse, as pages are way more complex. Back in the day was barely usable, today it would be plain useless.

[@troysanchez776]

Back in dial up days, the files saved in temporary files were handy to recycle for saving time the next time.

[@LumaControl]

Troy Sanchez yup

[@supermasterPIK]

rememeber GETRIGHT? And companies who billed for DATA TRANSFERRED., not connection time???

[@filanfyretracker]

I remember having to view movie trailers that way during the dialup days. since it was all quicktime back then id let it totally download and just pull the .mov from "Temporary Internet Files".

[@Amokra]

I remember doing that man I fill old :) I use to pull pictures from there when i got threw browsing on those sites that would disable "right-click to download" lol I thought "man I am a web-page hacker extraordinary"

[@krashd]

You wouldn't dream of emptying your temporary internet files in those days, that folder could mean the difference between a page taking minutes to load or just 10-15 seconds. I used to traipse through that folder for .mid files as I recall every website seemed to have some chimey plinky tune playing in the background and I wanted to save them so I could show off my "music collection".

[@georgeworley6927]

I had an analog modem in my home from about 1983 until 1994 when I switched to an ISDN line as I could get a free dedicated 2 channel ISDN connection through the ISP that I worked for. I ran a FIDONET BBS for 15 years. Started on an 8 bit CP/M computer.

[@baragonkunfan94thesecondar60]

ok boomer

[@skepticalvision]

Back in the 70s (late 77) my first modem, an acoustic coupled unit gave the whopping speed of 120 bps incoming and 10 bps outgoing. That was followed by a 300/75, then 2400bps then a 9600bps then 19K, and 56K. The cost was horrific in the early days.

[@alanharrison2726]

pmsl , A CB !!!!! it was free , but your so right ,

[@trajanaugustus8783]

Not to mention blocking your telephone while on line.

[@theharbingerofconflation]

with the early acoustic couplers you literally put your phone on the two coupler pads.

[@bryonmiller4326]

Holy crap, I didn't know they had a 120 bps modem. I used to run a board back in the day and my friend got ahold of this old 300 baud modem that was so big it was in a suitcase. I just got a 14.4k modem for the board and he'd call up and connect at 300 bps and start downloading files to see how long it would take me to drop carrier on him. lol. He had a 14.4k modem too, he just did that to piss me off.

[@ozzydio7233]

Back in the 90s early 2000s, my family had internet for 30 hours a month!!! Now, i reach this limit within one day.

[@Alex-fo6bc]

Torgeist how can you reach 30 hours in one day? 😂

[@RonJohn63]

That's... puzzling.

[@geraldhenrickson7472]

whoa...good catch. I was all caught up in the hours limit as opposed to Mb limit. Almost missed the obvious.

[@Ass_Burgers_Syndrome]

1.25 days

[@HereticDuo]

*points up* All these people didn't get the joke.

[@ccramit]

I remember a single mp3 taking longer to download back in 2001 on dial up than it does for me to download an 80gb video game today. CD mixes would be worth that much more to me since it would take over 20 minutes to get one song, if you even got the right one the first time. Everything is so easy nowadays. Not that I mind, I just miss the nostalgia of it all. I even remember the early days of online gaming on dial up. PS2 and a dial up modem. You'd always get crazy lag and rubber banding, but when you got a good connection, it was so fun.

[@craigjensen6853]

I remember going to my buddy's house in 1999 and his dad just got one of those newfangled cable modems (768kbps at the time). We went on Kazaa and for the first time you could download a song faster than the time it took to play it (barely). When I got my first job later that year, I had to have one. It was really amazing at the time, and being able to use your phone was a huge added perk.

[@juzujuzu4555]

Early 1994 playing Doom in our schools computer room with others in LAN. We had just got new 486DX2 66mhz machines, before that we had 286 16mhz machines =D That and NHL 94, those will forever stay in my head.

[@sjenkins1057]

56k was mindblowing, to those of us who remember 300 baud. You could read 300 baud as it came over the line--the biggest jump of all of them in the modem era was going to 1200 baud. Oh my, you couldn't read it in real time any more, at least I couldn't. Those lovely modem noises, if you worked with them enough, you could diagnose problems by listening to them. But I eventually always turned them off, because who wants to listen over and over again. 2nd land line for the win!

[@oldtwins]

2400 baud was ideal. 1200 a little too slow when it came to ANSI graphics or if you needed to do a bit of software downloading. 2400 was much more tolerable. 14.4 became important when software started getting larger and larger.

[@roachtoasties]

I had Prodigy in its day. I initially connected with a 2,400 bps modem. One day I bought a 14,400 modem and I was amazed with the speed. Downloading software from dial-up bulletin boards was a breeze. I was living in the turbo-zone.

[@edbouhl3100]

roachtoasties I can still remember using a 1200 baud modem with America Online before it was even called America Online. Ah, the evenings spent in the all text forums debating the meaning of the latest Twin Peaks episodes.

[@jshepard152]

Same! 14.4 was magic.

[@Meekerextreme]

My first modem was a 1200 baud, my friend had a 2,400 baud modem and I was always like WOW. This was on a 8088 machine as Windows wasn't even a thing, just DOS and my CGA graphics (same friend had VGA). But back then you just dialed up bulletin boards.

[@rschock22]

lol dude almost 25 years later i can come CLOSE to remembering the names of some friends on my old mIRC chat channels. Jesus. Where you at #Crond! #Syjump radio unite! lol. I'm 35. Kill me.

[@p0llenp0ny]

Same. I had a 1200 baud modem and when I switched to 14.4k it blew my mind.

[@junglejim8781]

Props to Norwich @ 4.58 👍 Always remember forums with threads containing high res pics titled "NOT 56K FRIENDLY" 😂😂

[@corgikun2579]

CHALLENGE: Flirt with a girl/guy and after a while ask her ICQ number ;)

[@pandorasnow]

i know my icq # and pass by heart.. also my aim.. lol

[@Real_McKinley]

icq.com Holy Crap!

[@miroslavmilan]

She would probably think you're being a rude jerk asking about her IQ.

[@khole15]

asl?

[@Aho0o0oB]

I require a 4k version of this video

[@pauldavis5665]

Yeah the good old days of dial up modems when a simple picture would take a long time to load on the screen fully.

[@BaronVonHaggis]

Great days, I used to go online in the middle of the night, to avoid anyone interrupting the call. That was until my old man got a £200 phone bill and ripped the fucker out the wall. 😣 Happier times! 😉

[@bdel80]

BaronVonHaggis Back in the 90s i was a teen and paid for it all..

[@BaronVonHaggis]

Good for you!🕹

[@mattishida3067]

BaronVonHaggis What age are u now?

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Did you pay back that phone bill to your old man, with interest?

[@paulsolfelt8452]

I was on a dialup service called spacestar back in 2004 that my dad used to use , since he switched to concast cable he let me use his old account and i went over the time limit by 2 1/2 hours, 90 a month was the limit, he was furiously mad at me because he said they charged him 250 dollars on his internet bill ,lol when I went to the website to check the tos it said you would be charged 1 dollar a hour for going past the limit , i still dont know if they actually tried to charge that much or he read the bill wrong. he is past on now ,LOL ! after that i figured out how to bypass netzero and junos time limits on there 10 hours a month free internet service so i never had any problems with dialup again as long as i was using it, LOL !

[@Nerfe3d]

that sweet sound of connection.

[@CreepyfishBOY]

Nice video. I managed to play Overwatch with 5.8 kb/s download speed with almost no lag. Thankfully they had a limit send/receive option which worked for me like a charm. Even without the options on, I had about 100 of latency, which is bearable by my standards and I managed to do very good in game.

[@adamball7414]

Lucky you! You only had to use this throughout the 90s? I'm from rural WV, USA and we had dial-up until about 2005.

[@Kippykip]

I had it until 2008

[@GlennnD]

Holy shit !

[@Pengi-kun]

I had it up until 2004 just because it was my cheapest option. When I got my first DSL connection at a staggering 768kbps speed I was blown away at how fast it was lol

[@RWL2012]

Chris Smith yep we went from 56Kbps dial-up to 512Kbps broadband in 2004! We were actually in town, but just not very well off I guess... I mean, we were still transitioning to Celeron M laptops from our Pentium II desktop with a load of random RAM sticks shoved in it to run XP haha... Next stage was *wireless* broadband with WiFi in 2007, at a whopping 2Mbps 🤣

[@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge]

Try Russia.2010...And nobody even had internet before like 2006 here.

[@LBXComputers]

I can't believe you didn't try hamster dance LOL

[@frosty6845]

LBX Computer Services Or the Space Jam website

[@rschock22]

omg win

[@ketas]

i really laughed on speedtest rounding it up to zero : P

[@TorutheRedFox]

wouldn't that be rounding it down?

[@UpLateGeek]

You've inspired me to do something I always dreamed of as a kid in the '90s, but can now I'm a network engineer: Start my own bedroom dial-up ISP! All I need is a couple of parts for some old Cisco routers I've got kicking around and I'll be good to go! Unfortunately with a customer base of 1 user (I don't even have a phone line!), it might not be what you'd call a commercial venture, but at least it'll be fun to log into some telnet BBSes and play some MUDs for old times sake.

[@shifty2755]

H

[@retrovideogamejunkie]

awww, forums with the classic "warning 56k users" for too many pictures... (and that old joke about porn pictures)

[@mixerfistit5522]

retrovideogamejunkie porn pictures? Half pictures more like! I had a 33k modem. I'd finish before the loading line got down to Jenna Jamesons navel haha :D

[@neatoelectro3687]

@Dave Cockayne Holly shit! It's real. it's really real! LMFAO! I thought this was a joke, but no... no, it's not people.

[@caligana]

I remember constantly staring at the little computer icons at 5:09 lighting up and getting excited when they were finally transmitting. It felt like something productive was happening haha

[@Del-Canada]

I started on a Hayes1660 300 bps modem. To give you an idea of speed difference. A 56k bps modem is 56,000 baud. A 300 bps modem is 300 baud. I first went online in 1984 and for just a simple page of text to load it could take as long as 4 minutes. One of my first terminals for connecting was CCGMS. 56k modems didn't exist back then. Upgrading to a 1670 Hayes 1200 bps modem was huge. You also had to wait before you upgraded to a 2400 bps or 14,4 bps modem because many phone lines couldn't handle those speeds at that point. Altho you could buy a faster modem and just use the dip switches on the back to lower the speed. Once you were able to afford a 14,4k modem and on a phone line that could handle it, you were what everyone was talking about at "copy parties" and in the local BBS scene. You were almost considered godlike. Hah.

[@wildbilltexas]

I wish I could have gotten 56K back in the late 90's. My stupid phone company (thanks GTE) had switched to digital phone lines by then and the fastest speeds I got from a phoneline were 31.2k. So when I got my cable modem in 2001 I threw all my phone modems in the junk parts box and never used the things again.

[@l34052]

The loading screen from the ZX Spectrum is far more nostalgic to me, the hours we spent as kids sitting in anticipation listening to those screeches and flashing lines across the screen....good times lol.

[@DustyRusty81]

I still have a 56K modem sitting next to my monitor, just sitting there.... for years

[@UomoPiccione]

mug coaster?

[@farawayman1010]

Is it still used?

[@joshpayne4015]

I'm dating myself here, but I went off to college with a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem. It was high tech, lol. I used it mainly to connect to my university's mainframe computer to check on available courses and their availability during the brief but hectic time of course scheduling. Also to connect to said mainframe for an organic chemistry course. Those were the days!

[@madhouse5213]

full class halo ce was fun trying to work out who killed you and then proceed to smack them in the face

[@Strahan740i]

I used to use my Commodore 64 and CCGMS terminal to browse the local BBSes. There were about 20 at the peak popularity of BBSes. I also liked using "Magic Desk" productivity software on it. I'd write stuff in the word processor then print it on my C64's daisy wheel printer. Sounded like mobsters having a turf war with tommy guns, lol

[@paulphoenix007]

Not really bad, we used to play age of empires 2 using 56k connection and it was great!

[@TDRR_Gamez]

Other games like Unreal Tournament were also played via 56k and that thing rocked a really nice speed

[@tharock220]

On the Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone. You could only hope everyone in the room had 4 green bars.

[@garrygemmell5676]

Bulletin boards and Prestel wow they were the days! The best modem was the Hayes Accura 56K Speakerphone - indestructible and fast! The days spent using tcp optimiser and mtu registry editing in Win95 for just a few extra bps lol Legend!

[@billant2]

BBS baby... BBS!! Dial it up!! :)

[@A42yearoldARAB]

Just use Centurylink, it is the same thing.

[@chrism1518]

A42yearoldARAB I have Centurlink and I want to fucking myself every single say. 300kbps download.

[@Baka_Oppai]

I have centurylink and it's 48mbps here in Las Vegas.

[@TheCerealHobbyist]

My 1Gbps fiber from CL is amazing. I've never had an issue and it's synchronous, nearly always hitting 800-960Mbps both ways - testing against their Ookla and Comcast's Ookla as well as hitting a number of iPerf3 servers. I love CL!

[@GlobalGaming101]

In Tucson, Arizona, CenturyLink max speed is 1Mbps. When the phone rep told me this I started laughing. I stopped laughing and got angry when she tried to convince me it was equevenlt to 50Mbps on cable internet.

[@Cobalt985]

How the fuck do you spin it to get that? 50 is 50 times bigger than one, tell me again how they're equal? Should be illegal to try and tell you shit like that, and you _know_ that there's too many people that fall for it.

[@matrix-path-of-neo]

2:06 ouch ! gave me shivers when you grabbed it like that ! had to pause video to breathe

[@RWL2012]

I last used dial-up in 2006, when it was still my grandparents' main / only connection. Surprisingly, I was able to load and watch KZbin videos just fine under Windows XP Pro RTM on an AMD Athlon 1600+ (1.4GHz) machine with 256MB of DDR"1" RAM, which was severely "under graphics carded" with merely an S3 Trio 64 2D display adapter with just 2MB of VRAM! I think their connection speed was 56Kbps by then; at the place they moved out of in 2005 they were only getting about 36Kbps I think... To think, they didn't mind having no house phone while I casually browsed a few sites and watched one or two KZbin videos haha (though they really did buffer surprisingly quickly!)

[@Dalek22comments]

It's hard to imagine youtube being so light weight back then, but it really was. Primarily because of the lower resolutions at the time in combination of lower quality videos (240p and 360p)

[@ZipplyZane]

The lower resolution videos are still there for mobile, though. And not 240p, but 120p, with lower quality audio. (Every other KZbin quality setting doesn't mess change the audio.) Now whether you can use the mobile website and get that low quality video, I don't know. I do know I was able to use a video downloader when I was on dialup for a week, back in 2015 or so.

[@hiphopguru81]

Back in 1996/1997 my best friend was one of the first people to get AOL. It was like an exciting treat to go over to his house. When AOL dialed up and was connecting it was like magic. When it finally connected it was awesome. Back then AOL cost money every minute online. His Mom would be like "okay you guys have used up 30 minutes of online time. You guys have to turn off the computer now. We figured out how to download hack programs to phish peoples AOL accounts. Steal their passwords and screen names. We used phishing bots. Aahhh the good ole days. Wish I was 14 again. Good times.

[@PS4sos21]

Oh the good ole days.. How I don't miss them...

[@barmymagician2970]

You never get 56k... Fastest we got was 51k

[@BillyBobDingledorf]

If I recall, it's technically limited to 53K. Most people weren't able to get out of the 40's. Calling it 56K was a farce.

[@jay1185]

@Eric Belinc Yeah, I usually connected at 48 or 49,xxx. When usage in the area would increase at certain times, i'd see 41-46,xxx. Southern IL.

[@TheGiulioSeverini]

My fixed speed was 51333 bps

[@RetroCheater81]

I remember connecting at 800 b/s... I still used it.

[@lobitome]

When 56k came out, I gladly paid around $200 for an internal card. The last time I bought a 56k modem it cost me $11. Then DSL came along, and I gladly paid $100+ a month. Now, I use the 30gb 4gLTE hotspot on my cell phone, which is included with my $60 "unlimited" data plan. I can only imagine what will be next for me.

[@Zock3rB3ast]

If you think about it.. the technical advancements we have today compared to back then.. it's insane. Such complicating electronics and all that.. and it's standard by now.

[@youreds91]

In the 90s I had a Diamond Cable (now Virgin Media)phone line. Their end of the connection was all digital which just left the analogue bit from the street cabinet to my house. I got 52000 every time, but once & only once I got an amazing 54666. I remember downloading a bootleg of the 2 Red Alert 2 CDs. I had to use a download manager as you got chucked off every 2 hours. From memory I could get 20MB down an hour. Took a few days, thank god the calls were free back then, although they knocked that on the head eventually.

[@feieralarm]

If there is one thing from the 90s I never wanna experience again, it's dialup speed. >_>

[@freedustin]

Yup, its how LAN parties were born.

[@Reteo]

stevenpcc - In the 90s? Websites weren't the hulking behemoths they are today. It wasn't going to win any awards, that much is true, but it was worth it just to have access at all.

[@phrobozz]

Not even... it was a pain, and downloading porn was horrible (which is why I saved EVERYTHING I downloaded from 94 to 2000), but the internet in general was awesome 14.4k all the way up through 56k.

[@raspoutine7241]

I used vmware's network manager to watch this at 56k. *The connection timed out*

[@r2dxhate]

It really helped to open things in a new tab, and then you could still look at the current page for a while until the next one loaded.

[@MountainHomeJerrel]

You brought up Alta Vista and I shouted aloud, "Oh... no you didn't!"

[@Amokra]

should have looked up Tripod or Geocities

[@rodmunch69]

If you want to emulate the 90s then you needed to do all this on Windows 3.1 and spend 5 hours dealing with trumpet winsock. Also when I first got my modem it was a 14.4k modem and wow, your example above is dramatically faster than what I remember, basically you can take you load times and multiple by 3. I recall wanting to see an NFL clip from ESPN around 1995(?) or so and it took 45 mins to down, then it played an avi that lasted maybe 15 seconds at probably 320x240 resolution.

[@greatpix]

A 14.4K modem was my 3rd one. I had a 300 baud and a 1200 baud before that. They were expensive back then too.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

So true. Some folks today can't understand how horrifically slow and painful things were that we take for granted today.

[@richardgates7479]

320x240 resolution, never seen that on KZbin.

[@Yerinjibbang]

insane man!

[@TrueDrezzer]

sweet video. thanks for putting it together. I spent a lot of time mentally calculating download speeds whilst watching the bytes run up on the indicator. great music too. reminds me of Monkey Island 2

[@CopiousAmountsOfDerp]

Web Standards have totally changed night & day since the 90's. Modern servers/browsers GZIP/deflate compress the HTML/CSS/JS media content prior to transmitting it. HTML5 built on previous standards to isolate static content such as CSS & JS into separate files for caching as oppose to HTML 3.0 tags like FONT which bloated the markup.

[@thom1218]

And yet most web pages from that era loaded much more speedily than the gobs of CSS and javascript framework garbage that's foisted on the modern browser today.

[@MrOpenGL]

The problem is that now that we have fast connections and powerful machines we have lazy coders. I mean come on, an SD writing app (Etcher) that is 80 MB?!?!? I mean come on, Gnome-Disks (which can write SD cards but also do much more like benchmarks, repartitioning and SMART monitoring) is only 1,2 MB...

[@IkarusKommt]

Gnome Disks (with its mandatory dependencies) is 77.3 MB. That does not include soft dependencies needed for filesystem support and such.

[@BIGBamBam86]

would take 30 to a hour to download 1 song sometimes longer and when someone would call it would disconnect lol

[@erinasherton8411]

ivan andrade Back when I had web tv not long after I Got It my parent’s Got a second line for a small price less Than what They had payed for regular home phone service, Before That They either warned me That They were Going To make a Call or just made a Call without warning and when a Call had Come In I Got knocked off also, But That Second line fixed all of That.

[@erinasherton8411]

Something I also remember was That I think That They may have Come out with split line where you Could use net and be on a Call at The same time on The main line without needing a second one.

[@TheStevehuff]

ivan andrade You didn't know that you could block incoming calls while on the internet?

[@Tigerman1138]

Time to date myself (at 41) First PC: 10MB hard drive 286 NO MOUSE Monochrome (that means no color for younger folks) And a 2400-baud (2.4KB modem if that measurement helps) and Prodigy. ATDT was typed. Oh yeah I did NOT have windows back then! It was all text DOS!

[@AM-bo2ns]

i don't go back quite that far - i'm 31 - and my first computer was a late 90s packard bell fobbed off on me by a family member, i was so frustrated with its 250MB HD that when I finally saved up the money for an upgrade i insisted i get one with a 1GB HD - i was sure i'd NEVER run out of room lol!! good times

[@hiitsmemindyourownbusiness2602]

You be surprised how many people still use dialup.

[@BilisNegra]

Very much doubt it: the bandwidth modern web pages demand makes dial up utterly unusable. The only exception I can think of if somebody who gets online exclusively to check email in text-only mode.

[@Wagoo]

They can IRC just fine :)

[@MrOpenGL]

IRC, Gophernet, play Counter-Strike 1.6, play Doom in multiplayer, play Unreal Tournament... :) The Internet is not only Facebook and KZbin.

[@Cobalt985]

If you didn't load any images, -chans would work as well. 2ch/5ch is already only a message board but it's not very... English.

[@benwyatt7619]

Meeee. Well I use wireless 3G instead because dial up is useless and it's the only wired option.

[@nickc8667]

If you were ever in the Navy this is how fast the internet is underway. You click a link then do some work and check on it in 10 or so minutes.

[@Blackadder75]

Still better than my grandfather in the navy.. He put a letter in the mail and then had to wait up to 6 weeks to get an answer :D

[@mhopkins7954]

Squid Vet here, I remember those days! I discovered RomNation during a UNITAS deployment and played SNES like it was going out style. It took about half an hour per game!

[@NickAlpha_]

When i first downloaded 200mb with a modem it was like breaking into a new area...

[@SteveStell]

i used dial up 56k until 2008 lol

[@isaiahash9697]

we stopped using dial up around 2008-2009 :) Edit: to fix my mistakes :-)

[@encycl07pedia-]

+Isaiah Ash Are you saying you depend on mobile networks like Verizon for all your web needs? Must be expensive. All other ISPs that use physical cable connections to boxes require modems, whether they're in a separate case from the router or not.

[@isaiahash9697]

oh yes thank you for pointing out my mistake :) guess i will fix that. we do still use a modem, i don't use mobile networks for all my web surfing needs that would be way too expensive. i have have thought about going back to dial up though, then i would spend less time on the internet and more time doing other things :-)

[@PACKERMAN2077]

Steve Stell my ldsl dropped to 20 or 30 K depending on the time of day and if it was raining... and that just last year 😖😔😖😔😖

[@PACKERMAN2077]

Noah Nichols well you don't look old enough to ever have needed to use it. 😄

[@Frysacidtest]

Uhh, WinModems. People don't realize that a WinModem means that instead of having its own DAC/ADC chip... it uses your already taxed processor!

[@wildbilltexas]

I agree.. WinModems were the cheapest modems you could get in the 90's. At stores like Fry's or CompUSA you could buy a off-brand WinModem for just a couple of dollars with a mail-in rebate. USRobotics and Zoom modems always worked the best for me.

[@Frysacidtest]

USR were always quality, but whatever you can get as an external serial modem would be faster than the cheapo PCI ones for $25. I was all about EarthLink. They had good service.

[@mrflamewars]

Fry's Acid Test piece of shit winprinters were the same, hope you didn't want to do anything else while you printed!

[@JohnSmith-kd6ip]

I get sentimental about my early days in the internet, around 1998. Not that long ago really, but feels kinda stone age.

[@DirectorHMAN]

Dude I used to play CS and C&C online with 56k, tbh it was as reliable as the servers are now

[@reggie3819]

I did the same and it was very stable!

[@nbibby]

It's amusing to me that Chrome dev mode has a device profile that simulates a 56k connection speed but I guess Google needs to include it.

[@erinbenbennick2574]

Love the tea/coffe cup stains on the Trust modem at 00:13.

[@mrbedford]

I remember when i first got my 56k I was worried that all the sites I had visited would appear on my phone bill! had no idea how it all worked back then.

[@TheCptCoy]

Well now that is an actual thing to worry about, but instead of the phone bill its google just keeping tabs on you.

[@Carlitros69]

mrbedford je je same to me xD

[@huh716]

Just connect to internet in my school and you have the same result!

[@t.w.3]

My first modem was a 300baud modem you put the phone handset on... You could literally read the lines as they came on the screen, line by line.. :P I got a 1200Baud modem in 1988, and the world changed.. I still have my 2400Baud internal ISA modem by Hayes. Great video. Thanks for making it. :) Got ISDN in 1992, and ADSL in 1994. (Norway)

[@oroville12345]

should have bought some bitcoin

[@seanld444]

Lol. That doesn't require a whole lot of network speed, though. Mostly just the GPU - which, I'm guessing is also trash on his experimental PC.

[@t16205]

@Stonkke Redmond They did not exist in the 90s

[@styldsteel1]

It's easy to laugh at your comparisons here, but remember we had nothing to compare to. What did make me want to throw my puter from the window was when someone tried to call me.

[@triggerwarning5025]

Love this channel! So fun to look back at tech I grew up with!

[@BlueBird-wb6kb]

With Australian Internet it still feels like this..

[@rowanrobinson]

Really? My 100mbit NBN says otherwise.

[@BlueBird-wb6kb]

Rowan Robinson Psst thats really fucking rare , and its mainly all FTTN , the street across from me is FTTP and im waiting an extra 2 years for terrible FTTN ... fucking liberal jackass's

[@bowman0096]

I have recently been connected to the NBN, it's actually slower than the previous adsl connection...

[@YesCh3f]

I live in a rural town and had adsl2+ only getting 18mbits, I now have NBN and getting around 90-95mbits. feelsgood

[@BlueBird-wb6kb]

Logurt my max is 3mbits... In the urban area near a city. .in a medium-high class suburb... though its understandable since the rural areas and new areas get the NBN, even now it might all become FTTN if labor isn't elected..and even then labor might forget about the FTTN problem and blame it on the Liberals and do nothing ;-;. .thats how are two party government works.. its like the two party's are a lie..

[@punker4Real]

internet explorer is dead RIP 1995-2018

[@domtron8873]

I have to use it for work. Absolutely hated it when I first started that job, but now it's meh. Caught myself accidentally opening internet explorer at home once haha

[@paulojorgetadeu2233]

Hello, Happy Year 2019, I liked the nostalgia of the old modems. There was another magic. Greetings from Portugal!

[@vealpunk]

i read the title as “THE INTERNET WITH A SEXY MODEM”

[@hotwaff]

2017: "brb going to use the wayback machine to buy some bitcoin." 2018: "brb going to use the wayback machine to sell some bitcoin."

[@Ambipie]

Everything used to be SQUEAKY CLEAN! Now there's so many ads. I could practically hear that modem going "my god this picture is huge!"

[@asif-alam]

Who else has seen this video using a 56k dialup connection?

[@corruptedpoison1]

it would never load

[@mver191]

Asif Alam I clicked on this video when you just posted this comment, now I already can see the first 5 seconds of this video and some comments..

[@Whiteshell204]

*LoL I remember getting my US Robotics 56.k modem I thought I was so cool...just tossed it out a few weeks ago in the box...I’m regretting it now..*

[@huntercox1859]

Dang your dial up is faster then my old At&T internet back when I was living in the middle of nowhere😂😂

[@mizukami999]

56K... I used to have the real speed of 28K something at best on a 56K modem.

[@dondavi5798]

Remember 14 4.......looking for the "picture heavy" warning on site tags so you know whether or not to start cooking dinner while the page was loading?

[@richardgates7479]

You had either the wrong modem or the wrong ISP, or bad lines that wouldn't support DSL anyway.

[@dondavi5798]

long before DSL. These are straight dial up modems, had to had to go find the splitter so you could run both the phone and internet or get kicked of the internet everytime a call came in. . To start it was 14.4 , upgrade was 28.8 then usrobotics 56k came out. Then you started getting into DSL. I was living in Houston at the time.

[@richardgates7479]

I was talking about dial-up and the reason you'd get 28.8k on a 56k modem is not because 56k didn't do 56k. The only thing faster at that time was ISDN which nobody could afford except for businesses. At that time I lived in the city. Next was SDSL which had the same up and down speeds, then ADSL and finally ADSL2 which gets you speeds over 1m and is a shared system.

[@dondavi5798]

I think you missed my original meaning. 56k modems weren't out, or at least popular yet, you only had the 2 packages from "Southern Bell" - remember them? 14.4 and 28.8 the 56's were a year (or two ) later and had a price tag to boot.

[@collinkelly2420]

You get to experience 128k if you go over data on AT&T. It is agony

[@huntermckee3093]

*Hughes net hovering* “tHeY aCtUaLlY cAlL tHaT tHrOtTlInG”

[@honkhonkler7732]

This...

[@Treyk901]

I have AT&T Fiber 300 Mbps up and down no caps 👍🏻

[@jacobwoodrow5289]

That "Ain't nobody got time for that!" video clip is from my local US TV affiliate! Nice to see here!

[@fiber0ptichell452]

I started at 300 baud.. the next week I had a c64 1200 baud modem. we could type faster... Remember call waiting would knock you offline..

[@fiber0ptichell452]

Sucks downloading that .gif or .jpg picture just to find out it was the wrong girl...

[@paulskalla6845]

I lucked out with a 2400baud modem I BBSed with for a long time. Those 150kb GIFS hurt (and were flaky on the CGA monitor I had. You got something sort of cell shaded, or if you turned on dithering something passable if you stood back and squinted). Thankfully I liked the message bases and TW2002 better.

[@Marc83Aus]

Install ad blocker, and change the browser settings to block all images, then you'll probably only get 10-30 second page loads on average.

[@richardvaughn2705]

For the record you can turn the sound off on the modem. It only plays the sound right after dialing in so that you can listen for the busy signal or listen in case if you dialed the wrong number. You can also change it so that it doesn't mute the sound after the connection is established and you can hear the entire transaction until you disconnect. It actually sounds cooler when its transferring after established as you have bursts of white noise (data transfer) interrupted periodically by dubsteb sounds (probing the line for bandwidth characteristics to readjust the transmission rate).

[@NoName-nw5kn]

The history of modems: As told by a Brit that never heard of BBS systems.

[@Dung30n]

I thought the S in BBS already stands for system? As in Bulletin Board System?

[@mazor13]

BURRRNNNN

[@encycl07pedia-]

+Martin Vrabec Reminds me of "DSL line."

[@NoName-nw5kn]

True, but saying BB system sounds off and may even be illegal in countries like the UK where someone might think you're talking about a BB gun and report you to the government. I don't know about you, but I'd rather stay out of the reeducation gulag.

[@encycl07pedia-]

+NoName Or you could just use "BBSes" or "bulletin board systems" instead of trying to explain why your stupid mistake wasn't a stupid mistake.