Do You Remember the Days of Dial-up?

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?