May 17, 2009
This morning I woke up and found that the router in the house was busted. Any attempts to connect through it would result in it rebooting itself. No problem, I tethered my laptop to my N95 and was back going about my daily internet activities. While I was surfing, I found a link to Left Right Left Right Left, a free live album Coldplay released, and went ahead to download it. I forgot that I was tethered to my phone until my connection unexpectedly hung up (I guess Rogers doesn’t want me downloading large files like that over their 3G network). Regardless, during the download, I was sitting there for a good 5 minutes watching it, averaging about 80kb/s. Then it occurred to me, it’s quite amazing that a phone is able to connect to the internet over cellular towers and achieve speeds that are 16x faster than the good old days of dial-up.
One fond memory I had when I was using dial-up many years ago was when I tried to download the brand new demo of Mortal Kombat II. It was 30mb and Netscape calculated that it would take about 2 hours to download. I was real hyped to try it out for some reason so I sat there waiting. I even intervened when I saw that my mom was going to pick up the phone with the worry that it might ruin the connection. Alas, the download died 45 minutes in. I still wanted to try out that demo so I proceeded to download it again and was successful the second time after letting it download overnight.
What memories do you have of using dial-up?
ooooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh dong… dong… kaaaaaaaaaaa zhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I do kind of miss that.
Your comment just gave me the idea to find an audio clip of that and convert it into a ringtone for my phone.
Ah yes, I remember my first computer which was a Hewlett Packard Bell 386 MHZ with 2MB of RAM, 100MB of HD space and a 2600 baud modem (2600 bytes per second transfer either uploading or downloading/ not both with ancient protocols like Z-Modem)! My parents bought the computer during the summer after I graduated elementary school. Upon starting Jr. High many some of my nerdy friends taught me how to use the modem. I spent countless hours dialing up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), often running one or two nodes on separate phone numbers in someone’s garage. This was how I was first exposed to the internet in 1995 when I found a BBS that acted as a gateway to its services. Everything was text based, everyone was well behaved and the idea that you wouldn’t have to use a dial up modem to connect with others online seemed like a fantasy. Before email every really took off hundreds of thousands of users used FidoNet which saved messages then later dailed up other BBS’s in overlaying area codes. It would take up to a month to get your message half way across the world, and it was fascinating!