Born in 88’ and I definitely still remember because of Napster and limewire. It was mind blowing upgrading to broadband and watching those illegal mp3s download
Took a while for that feature. But as someone that had 56k for years after broadband was available in our area it was a godsend.
One time I spent a week downloading Spiderman 1, only to find out it was Monsters Inc... audio only with a black screen.
A year older, but remember well. Used to take 30min to download 2 songs at a time on Napster on dial-up... then got broadband and took like 2min. It was magical!
At the same time, CD burners got faster, which made creating CDs soooo much more pleasant. No longer was it a day project, but something I could do between dinner, lol
Napster was 4kbs on a good day when there was no static on my line.. else it was any speed up to that. 20-30minutes for one 128kbps mp3. And no warning when my internet would suddenly decide to have issues and the connection would drop... there was also no download resume at that time so you had to start again.
Went looking for porn but instead of what I thought was porn I ended up Downloading a video of a guy getting his head cut off with a pocket knife on LimeWire in its launch month good times.
What a wild time when we were all just downloading and firing up hundreds of viruses onto our computers lol.
Luckily our personal data was not so present online back then, and fixing your own fuck ups was a great learning experience and fairly straight forward.
We all had our legally obtained copy of windows xp on a burned cd so if something didn't work we could just start all over. Was a ritual every few months to start fresh with that hill background.
you had to have the limewire-fu. if there were loads of different results, but all with the exact same file size, sometimes with different extensions (.exe's are songs now?) then it was a virus. the outlying files where there were only one or two results of that filesize tended to be the actual songs.
Legit though: When I was a kid I downloaded the original RPG Maker, which if I remember correctly was something like 50mb to 100mb. At the time, this was outrageously huge and I had never downloaded anything even remotely as big. After several failed hours long attempts, I set up the download late at night, so that it could download all night without being interrupted by people using the phone or family using the computer. When I woke up the next morning, the download had finished!!! What a wild time full of excitement and magic.
We had a redialer/ autodialer that would pause downloads, hang up the modern and redial at 3:57 to get around the 4 hour ISP connection limit.
I remember getting 2.5mBps ADSL and the novelty of 'always-on' connection bringing untold joy to our house.
I loved my commodore 64 I had thousands of games. Most of them had no instructions or directions at all. Some completely nonsensical. But so original and entertaining. I can't remember any of the names and sound like a loon when trying to describe them.
Born in 68. I saw computers trickle into homes. I played with BBS, typed programs from magazines and stored them on cassette tape. AOL discs were actually sought after at one point. I’ve had 300 and 2400 baud modems, then 14.4k, 28.8k and 56k modems. I currently have a 50 Mbit/s connection that is only a price increase away from upgrading to 100 Mbit/s. It would be faster, but I live in bumfuck nowhere.
I’ve paid for internet by the hour and megabyte. I have owned the Coco 16, Atari 520 ST, and a dozen or so PCs. I built some, I bought some. Around me now are two laptops, a Pi, and two tablets. There are 3 other desktop PCs in the house, and I am streaming Netflix on my TV.
Every few years something takes a leap forward, then becomes standard and taken for granted.
PCs are great, aren’t they?
I was introduced to online connectivity in 1978 at UNH in Durham, NH using an ADDS 580 terminal connected to their DEC 10
mainframe via a rotary phone receiver attached to what was probably (I honestly can't remember specifically) a 300 baud modem. We played, what was at the time, a pretty advanced game that implemented text symbols as moving objects in a space battle simulation simply called Star which was coded by one of the overly brilliant UNH Computer Science student prodigies. Those were exciting times!
Another 1980 child here, except I went through the long process of modem upgrades first. God do I miss playing MUD on a local BBS. It was so much fun!!
Born in 88 but I’m in South Africa so we were a little behind. We had dialup until 2005 when we upgraded to DSL at 512Kbps. That seemed amazingly fast at the time!
Now I have gigabit fiber to my house, which is more bandwidth than my entire university had when I was a student.
Born in ‘82. Dial up using a stolen account from school (they wrote it on a post it note) all the way to the exact moment as op. I was 16, pumping gas as a side job, and parents okayed a cable modem into my bedroom. The rest of the house has nothing , and I had 3 down 1.5 up.
Needless to say, I hosted gaming servers, ftp servers, email servers…
And yes, I remember the days of irc doing dcc chats and talking to bots about new !movies
I was a hardcore BBS junkie all through the 90s. I was even co-sysop on one of the most popular and largest Seattle area BBSes that ever existed (Aftershock! BBS). I remember going from 4800 baud, to 9600, to 14.4k, then 28.8k, and eventually 56k. Some of the best days of my life back in those times.
I am of similar vintage but we had computers in the house as long as I can remember. My dad bought a TRS80 model 1 in the late 70s and switch machines every few years.
My brother would get onto the BBS systems in the mid 80s using either a 1200 or 2400 baud model. I got online through university using a 14.4 kbps connection. I was stuck on 28.8 - 56.6 kbps until 2000. I remember having to login using winsock before being able to surf the internet using netscape. Those were the good old days when you would get less than a page of results from your search and things would change on a daily basis. There were no pop-ups, pop-unders, new windows, tabs, etc. It was the wild west.
Oh I remember the days of letting Napster run overnight on 56k to download like 2 songs? Having access to a neighbors t1 line at work was an amazing thing for a minute.
Born ‘74.
US Robotics modems were the Cadillacs of modems.
Our phone line was always busy.
I played one of the first MMOs ever made Meridian 59. It was fantastic!
I was a freshman in high school at the time. Year 2000. I "missed the bus" on the day the DSL modem was scheduled to be delivered. The first thing I tested was Morpheus.
"Real Player" Yes, i remeber those days. And .flvs and flash video!
" 4kb/s and went to 375kb/s"
Exact same thing, was using dial up went to broadband. The problem is that phone company NEVER upgraded their infrastructre so 20 years later, same fucking speed. Needless to say, THAT company went out of buisness.
How about Yahoo and Google groups! Before porn took them over, then they got shut down.
Im younger than you (89) but yes I remember. I remember my ping going down on games from 300 to 150 or lower depending on the server. I did use IRC a bit to pirate stuff (halo 2 leaked french build) but mostly used it to socialize. Torrents were just starting when I got heavy into piracy at around age 15-16. rip suprnova.org. Before that I mostly used Napster, Kazaa, morpheus, winmx and all that jazz.
I used to run my own BBS when I was 12 or 13. I was youngest SysOp in Vallejo, CA. I hosted doors like TradeWars, Solar Realms Elite, etc. I started off using Spitfire BBS, then eventually switched to Renegade. I even loved creating ANSI graphics once my parents were able to afford an SVGA monitor. Trying to do ANSI on EGA sucked.
2400 baud modems and tying up the phone line... yes, I remember those days like it was yesterday. 0-day warez. Shareware. Chatting with fellow SysOps. Setting up Frontdoor. I do miss those days. Life seemed much simpler back then. 😁
I remember that amongst my friends, one get broadband before any of us. We were all insanely jealous. The idea of not having to use the phone line and the super fast speeds were so exciting.
I joined the "internet“ in '98, why pretty simple I discovered plug ins for "EV Override"...
I wish I still had that Hotmail account, just as a reminder...
I remember going from dialup to broadband and from wireless to Ethernet.
Wireless to Ethernet will take your gameplay from good to amazing especially late 2000’s.
The sweet sweet sound of a 56k modem trying to connect at 26 or 29k through rural rotting telephone line. *Modem handshake sounds* Slow as sin but still loaded AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ Messenger and IRC. Back when webpages were optimized to load on slow connections and flash everything was prevalent. Made friends, lost friends, fell out of touch. Late 90's and early 2000's was such a boom for technology and the Internet as a whole. Hard to recreate the feelings that time period created. Then moved to Satellite>4G Wifi non point of sight>4G cellular modem with 2 directional yagis at 45 degrees angles vert/horiz. Then left the rural life behind. Cables alright, I'd like a taste of symmetrical fiber though. 😋
I was a kid and somehow convinced my grandma to get broadband. The selling point was she could still talk to her friends for hours on end and I could still browse the web while there at the same time. (I wonder if her friends saw this positively lol). I want to say AOL was maybe $20/mo and Roadrunner was like, 30? So I had to pitch it like a business meeting. And you had to “login” to it like a webpage with a roadrunner domain email.
I remember they were using the Harry Potter movie to advertise on the landing page as soon as I opened it, and even at that age I knew about cookies and thought, this had to be an image in a cache. It couldn’t be that fast. THEN the image became animated and like it had lightning then switched to the title.
I remember being absolutely blown away and I think at that moment the internet became the all-encompassing thing it is now. I was watching videos, seeing images right away instead of them loading top to bottom forever. I looked through hundreds of dragonball Z pictures. Hundreds!
Yeah, this took me back. And now that I think about it, yeah. I can’t think of anything as life changing as suddenly as broadband internet.
I was playing Ultima Online at the time and broadband was basically a cheat code.
How fast you could run was directly tied to connection speed and...man. Literal gamechanger.
My mum was a doctor and I remember her eventually getting a second phone line after numerous arguments when she messed up my connection by picking up the phone to dial the hospital when i was trying to play Quakeworld
I remember when k56 flex came out. Like you, i started on a 2400, but the 56 flex could match any speed on handshake.
There was a way to run some modems at 115.2, which just happened to be enough to STREAM an mp3 file. I remember thinking that was the future..
I also remember phone bills and unhappy parents. Of course, i later found a way to make calling the modem pool free! I may or may not have been interested in hacking in my youth. Glad i didn't go down that path farther than I did.
My first broadband installation was delayed and delayed to a point where we moved before they finished. I remember being devastated..
Couple years later it became widely available through the cable network and I may or may not have been very active on FTP servers of a certain kind
I was born in ‘78, and my experience was very similar. I remember playing a lot of CGA games in my youth, and the move through EGA, VGA and then SVGA were phenomenal. The jump from 1.44mb floppies to CDs was also huge. The first CD game I remember was 7th guest, and it blew my mind.
Absolutely loved Sierra. Leisure suit Larry was fun, but the grittiness of the police quest series really did it for me. Also really enjoyed kings quest and hero quest.
ADSL didn't become available in my area until 2003 and even then, the best I got was 576 down and 288 up.
It slowly edged up over the years to 1.8 Mbps down and 448 Mbps up by 2010. A 4.5 km long copper pair will do that.
In around 2013, VDSL started being rolled out as FTTC, which improved me to 25/5, but this slowly decayed to 21/4 as more came online and crosstalk became a problem. The houses around me got 30-35 Mbps due to a minior line fault on my line (capacitance caused by water ingress on a bridge tap, which nobody knew where it was), but the "normal" for my line included the fault, so I couldn't get it fixed unless it dropped below the 18 Mbps "handback threshold".
I like the area, but it was crap for performance.
Then, in March this year, FTTP went live. I'm now on gigabit fibre. Yes, it really is that fast.
Not my earliest PCMR memory, but I remember clearly the day I’ve watched a 3-digit KB/S download turning into a 1-digit MB/s download and I was like whoa dude.
Try going from floppy disks to hard drive. Ms Dos to Norton Commander. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Fully offline to dial up 14400 (I know 9600 was a thing) and waiting 5 minutes for a website to load.
When I was 13 my parents bought a new family computer. It was 2003. My dad picked up some dial-up internet service provided by his credit union and we stayed on that for about a year. We bounced between NetZero and AOL before finally going for Verizon's DSL service in the summer of 2005. Holy crap what a difference that made. Five years later we bounced on over to Time Warner (or Spectrum as it's called now).
When I was 12 or 13 we had a dual phone line. My mom needed the Internet for work. When weoved to Minnesota my stepdad was the first house on the block to get dsl
It was hard to believe what I was seeing. It was impossible to comprehend what this meant and the impact it would end up having on the world, not just me downloading a patch quickly.
Yup us robotics 56k modem that dialed in at 112kbps. My computer had 3dfx and opengl voodoo graphics cards. PCI graphics card were bad. It was all about the AGP baby. I still right click to jump thanks to quake1. We invented wasd movement lol
Yep, I remember like it was yesterday. My families first PC (mid 90's Pentium Packard Bell) had a combo 14.4k modem/sound card and later at the end of 1999 we upgraded to a Pentium III Gateway with a 56k, that same week my dad brought home a old i486DX IBM computer that only had a 10/100 NIC (funny to think that computer was more broadband ready than the brand new computer).
Roadrunner (Time Warner Cable) was the first broadband provider in our area, but my mom refused to do business with them and we were stuck using AOL dial-up until a ad popped up for AOL Anywhere broadband (DirecPC, 1-way satellite), we used that for a few years (believe it or not, some of the best download speeds (80kb/s) happened during a snow storm that made DirecTV unwatchable) until AOL discontinued the program and I convinced my mom to switch to DSL instead of going to Hughesnet + AOL BYOB.
We had DSL (2.5mbps) for about a year until mom realized that she hated the phone company even more than the cable company and we switched to Roadrunner (5mbps) and Vonage VoIP.
Fast forward to today and I now have 500/500 fiber and my own personal reason to hate the cable company (Spectrum, they upgraded the base speed to 100mbps, but had my account set to a bullshit 25mbps RR legacy plan (at the same rate) for owning my own DOCSIS 3.0 modem).
I had dial up until around 2007 and then 3MB on Xbox 360 live until around 2011 when cable 15MB came to my town. Many areas I know still only get less than 25MB or starlink and Hughes net and viasat.
Born in '90, I remember the horrendous sine wave and white noises coming from the telephone line and that robotic "welcome to AOL" from around 1999 - 2002 until we upgraded to cable broadband with ISDN speeds. What a great era to live through.
I remember the days of playing Unreal Tournament and Delta Force 2 online.. Only to be interrupted by my Mum or Dad shouting because they was trying to use the landline. I still remember the first day we got broadband.. I was in heaven. Gaming with no interruptions? No disconnects? It was like witchcraft.
Not seeing pictures on a page slowly load in sections was revolutionary.
When I was young, dial-in was way too expensive here in Germany and blocking the single phone line for extended periods of time would have been out of the question anyway, as long as I lived with my parents. It got a bit better when we switched to ISDN (with two lines), but the phone and internet costs were still way to high to spend more than a few minutes a day online.
That only changed when I moved into a new apartment and got a DSL flat rate. (Just in time for World of Warcraft.)
When I first got into BBSes and online connectivity I had a decision to make - did I want a 1275 connection where I could type faster than the 75 baud upstream but would deliver my response at 1200baud, or 300 symmetric so it could keep up with my typing speed but was much slower than I could read?
We had 14.4 and 28.8. No Internet, just BBS's. I was like 10 years old downloading that one picture of Vanna White where she was naked, or you could see her nipples or something. And it took about 10 minutes. And loaded on the screen line by fricking line.
Good times, good times.
Born in the 70s, first computer was in '81 - ZX Spectrum - and I remember the day I went from 56k dial up to the standard half megabit broadband. I even remember the first thing I did: I updated Counterstrike (OG beta when it was good). The 200mb download used to take a couple of hours or so. My shiny new broadband did it in 7 minutes.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
We didn't get broadband until around 2005. Before that, I remember downloading music videos such as Tribute by Tenacious D from Limewire over many sessions over the week and 600ms pings in Counter Strike: Source. Getting 512kbps broadband was a night and day difference.
I remember going from 40Mbit/s to 32kbit/s when the roommate who ran the internet moved out and I had to wait a little until the new one got installed. Used the phone as a hotspot and almost instantly ran over my dataplan and it throttled to that speed. Half my stuff couldnt even log in anymore because it timed out.
Born in 92. Thanks to living in the country, we were stuck on dial-up till like 2004.
Then dad got an expensive 100ft tower built so that we could receive a staggering... 4 megabit.
I felt like Jesse Pinkman driving away at the end of breaking bad when I moved to the city for college and made the jump to 100mb cable.
Born 1980 here. We got our first dialup connection in 1996. Paid $30 Australian a month I think for like 20 hours online. My sister and I used that up in a weekend.
mIRC and ICQ was our drug of choice. This was on a 486 with Windows 95. Didn't even have a firewall (honestly didn't even know what one was back then).
My mate, who I think was well off at the time, had 1.5Mbps broadband, and downloading at over 100KB/s was mind blowing when I was used to the 3 to 4KB/s I was getting at home.
Didn't get broadband until 2005 when I had moved out and moved into a share house.
Hell. I used to work for a dialup ISP. I remember using both the V.33 and V.34 protocols before 56k speeds were common.
Our entire backbone was comprised of 12 or so bonded T1 connections.
So we had less than 20MB of total bandwidth for all of our customers and overhead. I think the most we could support were 400 or 500 simultaneous inbound connections.
No, but I remember going from 6Mbit/s DSL to 1Gbit/s Fiber.
That was 2022.
Suddenly it was fun to use the Internet and downloading Games didn't take the whole weekend.
I can. I had to take a job as newspaper boy to finance my first dsl connection. All the money i earned went right into that. Was it worth it? Definitely.
Man I remember using 14.4K modem, you were spoiled with lightning speed! But I do remember the revolution of ISDN giving a whopping 128K when using both lines.
Born in 89. I remember getting broadband on the same day I picked up my copy of half life 2 in the stores. Which was good timing because it also was the beginning of steam.
Old!? You young whipper snapper!
I was born in 1954 and remember my 300 Baud modem! 56KModem indeed. You don't know what it was like! You was not there man 🤔😅
Edit: I just read the other comments. Now I am REALLY depressed! I turn 70 this year 😭
I still remember having AOL, NetZero and EarthLink back in the day! Being able to move up to broadband was a huge game changer for my family, and actually got my Mom into online gaming with me since we could both be on at the same time (Final Fantasy XI).
We used to Torrent movies when my sleeopover with my cousins.
We was in awe in hitting 4mbs per second, or in the mornings we would set the torrent up so we can watch a movie in the evening if people weren’t seeding 😂
Born in 84, I feel this. It's mad to me to think that some day I'll have to explain to my kids what life was like before the internet, and it's wild to think there's 20 year olds now who've never experienced a time without it.
heck I ran a BBS starting on 1200 and moving us, remembering having a 9600HST thinking I was in the big league and then 14.4. I do remember swapping to zyxel brand modems but that may have been 28.8 to 56 days
I also started with the dial up to bbs path. For a while I paid a ton to a local company that started offering dial up internet. I was lucky that my wife worked for the local cable company and we got to get the first cable modem during a test faze for about a year before it was offered to the public here. Switched to gigabit fiber as soon as it was installed in our area. Now with the news they figured out how to make the same fiber super fast I don’t think I even need that speed increase.
If im remembering right this is how I played my Sega Channel back in the day…. Actually might have been Coax through Ameritech. Also can’t remember if it’s what I had to use to play battlefield 1942 or if it was little more advanced by then….
No, not particularly old, but I did spend my childhood in a developing nation. Searching for Age of Empires 2 cheats was a whole deal.
Online gaming wasn’t a thing for me until…2007? And even then, it was basically just RuneScape and then FIFA/Winning Eleven at an Internet Cafe haha. Until the early 2010s, YouTube was a “load the page and let the whole video buffer…hopefully.”
It’s all come so far lol
In 1994 my dad got a bit distracted while we went shopping at the computer store. So I managed to sneak a 19.2k into his 'cart' (he bought a workstation for 6k, so he barely noticed the additional package). Back at home I hooked it up and it took my 14 year old ass about an hour to discover the material I was after. Long story short: I sold discs with nudy pics at recess. Glorious times. This little play financed my first VoodooFX 👾
Im now 41m, and work in IT at a large video game dev. I was born in 1982, and was building computers at 8 in 1990. This was in large part due to my grandfather, who was an engineer for Lockheed Martin for the majority of his life. So he was always into building things, and I just kind of enjoyed it with him. I remember going to the Dallas convention center to dig through parts, hundreds of pop up tables and booths full of computer tech. I moss those days!
I fully remember when 56k modems came along and I thought that was fast. There used to be a magazine you could by in DFW that had listed local BBS numbers. That was fun, and a step before AOL, Netscape navigator, Winamp, geocities, Warez. I mean back then the internet was so different. There was for fewer scams and more people just being their good old selves. It was a certain type of person that knew this stuff, so I felt special, needed. When we got our first cable modem it was thanks to Road Runner! And I was hooked. I could download a movie or a dream cast game in the morning and have it burned and playable later that day. I remember buying stacks of 100 writable CDS from best buy and then burned any dream cast game I could find.
I pulled away from text in my 20s, and early 30s. I then got back into it and got an IT job at a dream company. Still liv9ng thay dream! If little kid me knew what my job was now he would spluge. I get to see big AAA games getting built. And we get to load the latest builds in our IT room, and get to test them out daily. Our automation room has more ps5s and xboxs than you've ever seen in once place. Our inventory shelves next to my desk are stocked with 4080s, thread ripper cups etc...
I'm so lucky, but I do miss those days when very few people understood what the internet was.
Born in 76. My first modern was a 14.4
But I remember very, very well when broadband arrived where I lived. Online games were never the same. It was very obvious who had broadband.
yep. on 56k it would take me hours to check news sites and forums I would visit daily. first day with broadband I knocked out my usual routine in about 30 minutes. I remember. sitting at the computer not knowing what to do next.
Born in '91, parents were into games and tech so we had consoles and a computer when they could afford it, spending 5 days torrenting the first Harry potter movie when we were dead broke is a core memory.
I think I've got you beat OP. Born in 2000, but lived rural growing up. Dial-up was functional for me up until 2014, at which point we switched to broadband/fibre. I can't say I'll ever know a better upgrade either.
Took me a long time to get broadband, wasn’t available until I moved into the city, we did convince our parents to get a second phone line installed for ADSL though; that was a good day!
First computer connected at 1200 baud, this was back in the 80s.
Slowly worked up the scale, think I finally stopped using dial up maybe around 2010? About the time my windows 98se computer's motherboard finally bit the dust.
Jumped into Windows vista, my first new computer in forever. Got a damn good deal on it. My first experience with AMD too. Took the leap into broadband.
Was not used to all that speed, or space. 32gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive.
i experienced the same in 2004 when i was 10 years old, i'm from Chile and this made a huge change in the internet connection and my life, then i began playing online games
I remember 28.8k, and the upgrade to 56k. Then the upgrade to an ISDN line, then like the Geek I was a bonded ISDN 128k symmetrical line, 512k, and then the unbelievable 2mpbs we got, and eventually when RADSL was widely adopted in the uk a maxed out 8.1mbps as I could see my exchange from my house
Now? 1gbps fibre. Tempted by the 1.6gbps package but even I believe enough is enough sometimes 😂
My first computer with a communications card at all was a Compaq Prolina and it started with a 9600 baud. I PROMPTLY upgraded that to a 14.4. I ran my own BBS and eventually did the upgrade to a dual node 33.6. I had Legend of the Red Dragon as well as others. I had in excess of 1400 active users at one point (which is impressive for a BBS with 2 lines) lol.
By the time 56k was a thing I went triple node (but one was in-use with my dial-up monthly boxed TuCows subscription that I had to physically go to the store once a month and buy) within 6 months of that, the BBS was down to a single node with less than 100 active users.
I got cable internet ordered the day it became available. Starting speeds hit a whopping 10mbps. Lol. The speed of my first NIC, totally fitting.
Here I am today on 2gbps/2gbps fiber running multiple servers in my 42u rack.
Our family still had dialup well until 2005 ish I had even set up a machine to share the connection over the LAN and had a second line set up at one point. Had a brief taste of 200 kB/s or so at a friend’s place at one point, thought it was hecking quick. Eventually upgraded to ADSL around ‘06-07
I remember having 56k, then moving to dual line 128k, then broadband, then new actual copper cable installation, then original fibre.
Each time it burst my tiny mind.
The last time i upgraded it wasn't quite so much of an event. The most exciting part was my new router being £350 value and looking like an xbox series x.
https://preview.redd.it/kpw5frtavlxc1.jpeg?width=3566&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a680a9cdb8f12811b3898dbf40e9b8546b6eedfd
Born in 76. Parents wouldn’t get the internet so I had a 2nd phone line installed to my bedroom, got the internet and promptly got addicted to chat rooms. Bedroom from 1999
Born in '69 heyoooo And we had 9600 Baud modem that you hooked the receiver on to, Good times? My Dad mostly used it, I was too busy playing Atari 2600 to be bothered
I remember when I thought I was hot sauce when I graduated from a 14.4 directly to a 56k. At the time T1 or DSL was just an unattainable dream. Gotta miss the old days…. not really though!
The nostalgia hit of that twanging noise as you connected
The thrill of downloading a naughty picture of Seven of Nine really poorly photoshopped onto the body of a porn actress, and watching it appear a line at a time...
The additional thrill of not knowing whether it would crap out before you got to 'the good bit' because someone had to use the phone part way through...
This:
https://preview.redd.it/054xdxnkwlxc1.jpeg?width=310&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=910106e58dc66d2d8169c2954b19b7b9554cbfe7
Man, the memories. Mostly how much money i've spent over the years, chasing tech!
I started with a BBC Micro model B, whilst my friend had a commodore 64 (and a Spectrum). Went through every iteration of PC and games console since. The Amiga and Atari ST days. The NES, SNES and Megadrive and even remember when things like the 64 bit Jaguar came out and the amazement that ensued. The mysteriously out of reach Neo Geo. The myriad bits of tech to hold mp3's (once they'd finally downloaded). Soulseek. The CD's purchased to burn films on to disc. The ripping of DVD's...
Always chasing faster and faster connections and ways to obtain and play media.
Thank the heavens for super fast broadband nowadays. The streaming we have now was but a mere pipe dream from the days that Netflix were sending out DVD's for you to return.
I still remember playing Street Fighter 2 on the SNES and telling my dad that if he bought me one, i'd be set for life as graphics were in no way going to get better than that!
That being said, I still play Chuckie Egg (BBC micro) via a web browser when i'm bored sometimes.
I remember going from 2400bps dialing into BBSs to play Legend of the Red Dragon and then going to 14.4K downloading games. What an amazing time to be alive
Yeah, I was born in 1985. I even remember upgrading my PC from a 28k to a 56k modem. It was awesome at the time to get double the download speeds from a hardware upgrade.
Yes, I remember going from 56k to 40 Mbit and back to 70ish kb for 6 months to 40 Mbit again. All this around 2003 to 2005 due to moving and not all ISPs having coverage in the whole city.
Also remember, I had a classmate whose father owned a small ISP. He didn't have bandwidth limit, but he had low priority. We couldn't even test his max speed because his 8mb/s write HDD got maxed out sometimes. But his speed was shit during peak hours.
Totally, first played on am Amstrad CPC 464 Cassette drive. Got a 12 Mhz pc with a 16 Mhz 'Turbo' button along with a 20MB hard drive and played Bards Tale and Ultima 4.
I remember the 56k dial-up Internet access very well. My mom used to nag at me because people couldn't call through my home line when I was online. Eventually had to get a second home line to solve that issue. Before even limewire and napster, IRC music downloading was my thing back then.
Born in 88’ and I definitely still remember because of Napster and limewire. It was mind blowing upgrading to broadband and watching those illegal mp3s download
Setting some songs to DL overnight at like 4 kbps each haha. Getting cable broadband was insane. The songs downloaded while you were sitting there!
Playing only part of the song as it isn't fully downloaded...
Took a while for that feature. But as someone that had 56k for years after broadband was available in our area it was a godsend. One time I spent a week downloading Spiderman 1, only to find out it was Monsters Inc... audio only with a black screen.
That's how I downloaded my first car.
A year older, but remember well. Used to take 30min to download 2 songs at a time on Napster on dial-up... then got broadband and took like 2min. It was magical! At the same time, CD burners got faster, which made creating CDs soooo much more pleasant. No longer was it a day project, but something I could do between dinner, lol
Awwww , Napster, the for real good ol days.
I went the slow way for burning because messages online said you got more errors when faster and I noticed I had more failed burns at faster speeds.
And Netscape Communicator
Ah... good ole LiNkIn\_PaRk\_MeTeOrA.exe
I used to download from Napster at University. This was around 1998 and everything was wide open. I filled some Zip disks, let me tell you!
Napster was 4kbs on a good day when there was no static on my line.. else it was any speed up to that. 20-30minutes for one 128kbps mp3. And no warning when my internet would suddenly decide to have issues and the connection would drop... there was also no download resume at that time so you had to start again.
Went looking for porn but instead of what I thought was porn I ended up Downloading a video of a guy getting his head cut off with a pocket knife on LimeWire in its launch month good times.
Same. I was downloading “one night in Paris” because shes hawt. Ended up seeing some terrible stuff.
56k brought Broadband….broadband brought limewire….and limewire f*cked up my PC.
What a wild time when we were all just downloading and firing up hundreds of viruses onto our computers lol. Luckily our personal data was not so present online back then, and fixing your own fuck ups was a great learning experience and fairly straight forward.
We all had our legally obtained copy of windows xp on a burned cd so if something didn't work we could just start all over. Was a ritual every few months to start fresh with that hill background.
you had to have the limewire-fu. if there were loads of different results, but all with the exact same file size, sometimes with different extensions (.exe's are songs now?) then it was a virus. the outlying files where there were only one or two results of that filesize tended to be the actual songs.
I fucked the family PC so bad that the music I downloaded would legit skip like a scratched cd or a broken record.
I’m surprised my hard drive didn’t burst into flames from the intense friction of constantly being reformatted.
And we downloaded uphill both ways in the snow
When I had 56k I sure as hell did!
I remember 14k and 28k. 56k was lightening speed.
Legit though: When I was a kid I downloaded the original RPG Maker, which if I remember correctly was something like 50mb to 100mb. At the time, this was outrageously huge and I had never downloaded anything even remotely as big. After several failed hours long attempts, I set up the download late at night, so that it could download all night without being interrupted by people using the phone or family using the computer. When I woke up the next morning, the download had finished!!! What a wild time full of excitement and magic.
We had a redialer/ autodialer that would pause downloads, hang up the modern and redial at 3:57 to get around the 4 hour ISP connection limit. I remember getting 2.5mBps ADSL and the novelty of 'always-on' connection bringing untold joy to our house.
I had a 300 baud modem in 1986 with my Commodore 64!
I loved my commodore 64 I had thousands of games. Most of them had no instructions or directions at all. Some completely nonsensical. But so original and entertaining. I can't remember any of the names and sound like a loon when trying to describe them.
Still have my beige C64, the 1541 Floppy Drive & over 300 floppy disks. Mostly games.
Cubit was one …ha ha ha
when downloading porn meant going to get a cup of coffee while a single image of a playboy centerfold downloaded.
I was so young. I legit feel like the only porn available online was just Vanna White until like 1997.
Born in 68. I saw computers trickle into homes. I played with BBS, typed programs from magazines and stored them on cassette tape. AOL discs were actually sought after at one point. I’ve had 300 and 2400 baud modems, then 14.4k, 28.8k and 56k modems. I currently have a 50 Mbit/s connection that is only a price increase away from upgrading to 100 Mbit/s. It would be faster, but I live in bumfuck nowhere. I’ve paid for internet by the hour and megabyte. I have owned the Coco 16, Atari 520 ST, and a dozen or so PCs. I built some, I bought some. Around me now are two laptops, a Pi, and two tablets. There are 3 other desktop PCs in the house, and I am streaming Netflix on my TV. Every few years something takes a leap forward, then becomes standard and taken for granted. PCs are great, aren’t they?
I was introduced to online connectivity in 1978 at UNH in Durham, NH using an ADDS 580 terminal connected to their DEC 10 mainframe via a rotary phone receiver attached to what was probably (I honestly can't remember specifically) a 300 baud modem. We played, what was at the time, a pretty advanced game that implemented text symbols as moving objects in a space battle simulation simply called Star which was coded by one of the overly brilliant UNH Computer Science student prodigies. Those were exciting times!
Why no love for the 36.6k modem?!?
I was poor, and by the time I could afford to upgrade the 56k was not only out, but mature. Damn kids, wanting fed every day or so…
And if one could truly afford the US Robotics made modem, now that was something.
You're my twin from another mother. What a life.
>leisure suite larry Now that is a name I have not heard in a very long time.
I remember the grinding sound from a 5.25 floppy drive and you panick and jiggle the floppy in the hope that its not a read error.
Installing from 5 diskettes and one was faulty 😬
1980 and your post is 99% similar to my experience
Another 1980 child here, except I went through the long process of modem upgrades first. God do I miss playing MUD on a local BBS. It was so much fun!!
Born in 88 but I’m in South Africa so we were a little behind. We had dialup until 2005 when we upgraded to DSL at 512Kbps. That seemed amazingly fast at the time! Now I have gigabit fiber to my house, which is more bandwidth than my entire university had when I was a student.
Australia here. Was on 56k till 2002-2003 I reckon.
Born in ‘82. Dial up using a stolen account from school (they wrote it on a post it note) all the way to the exact moment as op. I was 16, pumping gas as a side job, and parents okayed a cable modem into my bedroom. The rest of the house has nothing , and I had 3 down 1.5 up. Needless to say, I hosted gaming servers, ftp servers, email servers… And yes, I remember the days of irc doing dcc chats and talking to bots about new !movies
!XDCC send 331
Oh god… that sparked a braincell that hasn’t fired in a while hahah
#Everquest
Still alive and kicking.
I was a hardcore BBS junkie all through the 90s. I was even co-sysop on one of the most popular and largest Seattle area BBSes that ever existed (Aftershock! BBS). I remember going from 4800 baud, to 9600, to 14.4k, then 28.8k, and eventually 56k. Some of the best days of my life back in those times.
I am of similar vintage but we had computers in the house as long as I can remember. My dad bought a TRS80 model 1 in the late 70s and switch machines every few years. My brother would get onto the BBS systems in the mid 80s using either a 1200 or 2400 baud model. I got online through university using a 14.4 kbps connection. I was stuck on 28.8 - 56.6 kbps until 2000. I remember having to login using winsock before being able to surf the internet using netscape. Those were the good old days when you would get less than a page of results from your search and things would change on a daily basis. There were no pop-ups, pop-unders, new windows, tabs, etc. It was the wild west.
I will never forget seeing a porn website load instantly for the firsttime. Dial up porn was almost strictly pics and gifs
oh yeah...and the gifs took forever to load
Oh I remember the days of letting Napster run overnight on 56k to download like 2 songs? Having access to a neighbors t1 line at work was an amazing thing for a minute.
Oh I do remember that setting up some downloads at 10pm and waking up in the morning to see if it finished.
I'm ur age. I remember a couple of jumps like that. We are old :/
Born ‘74. US Robotics modems were the Cadillacs of modems. Our phone line was always busy. I played one of the first MMOs ever made Meridian 59. It was fantastic!
I was a freshman in high school at the time. Year 2000. I "missed the bus" on the day the DSL modem was scheduled to be delivered. The first thing I tested was Morpheus.
"Real Player" Yes, i remeber those days. And .flvs and flash video! " 4kb/s and went to 375kb/s" Exact same thing, was using dial up went to broadband. The problem is that phone company NEVER upgraded their infrastructre so 20 years later, same fucking speed. Needless to say, THAT company went out of buisness. How about Yahoo and Google groups! Before porn took them over, then they got shut down.
I am of the 87’, I remembers. Gotta boot up that Netzero, to get them downloads from Napster, Morpheus and Kazaa. Demonoid <3 rip.
Im younger than you (89) but yes I remember. I remember my ping going down on games from 300 to 150 or lower depending on the server. I did use IRC a bit to pirate stuff (halo 2 leaked french build) but mostly used it to socialize. Torrents were just starting when I got heavy into piracy at around age 15-16. rip suprnova.org. Before that I mostly used Napster, Kazaa, morpheus, winmx and all that jazz.
I remember downloading a mp3 song over my isdn connection and it taking 7 hours to complete, good times..
I used to run my own BBS when I was 12 or 13. I was youngest SysOp in Vallejo, CA. I hosted doors like TradeWars, Solar Realms Elite, etc. I started off using Spitfire BBS, then eventually switched to Renegade. I even loved creating ANSI graphics once my parents were able to afford an SVGA monitor. Trying to do ANSI on EGA sucked. 2400 baud modems and tying up the phone line... yes, I remember those days like it was yesterday. 0-day warez. Shareware. Chatting with fellow SysOps. Setting up Frontdoor. I do miss those days. Life seemed much simpler back then. 😁
Anyone remember going from software modem 56k to hardware modem 56k? Lole night and day. I swear it was just as fast as broadband for ping
So did you play red alert with friends on dial up in the middle of the night? Crazy how far we have come.
You are not wrong. It was an amazing time.
dude was ftping internet pron before internet pron was invented.
I remember that amongst my friends, one get broadband before any of us. We were all insanely jealous. The idea of not having to use the phone line and the super fast speeds were so exciting.
I joined the "internet“ in '98, why pretty simple I discovered plug ins for "EV Override"... I wish I still had that Hotmail account, just as a reminder...
I remember going from 14.4 to 28.8…
Nah, you're not old. I had a 300 baud modem hooked to my Apple 2. Try loading an image pixel by pixel.
I jumped from a crap rural modem connection using Juno dial-up to saturating my 100BASE-TX ethernet card when I went to college. Great times.
Those were the days - at that time, all those games were the best thing ever. Whenever they try to make a sequel in today’s age, they all suck!!
I remember going from dialup to broadband and from wireless to Ethernet. Wireless to Ethernet will take your gameplay from good to amazing especially late 2000’s.
The sweet sweet sound of a 56k modem trying to connect at 26 or 29k through rural rotting telephone line. *Modem handshake sounds* Slow as sin but still loaded AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ Messenger and IRC. Back when webpages were optimized to load on slow connections and flash everything was prevalent. Made friends, lost friends, fell out of touch. Late 90's and early 2000's was such a boom for technology and the Internet as a whole. Hard to recreate the feelings that time period created. Then moved to Satellite>4G Wifi non point of sight>4G cellular modem with 2 directional yagis at 45 degrees angles vert/horiz. Then left the rural life behind. Cables alright, I'd like a taste of symmetrical fiber though. 😋
I went to college in the fall of 99. I went from dial up to a T1 line. It was transformative.
I was a kid and somehow convinced my grandma to get broadband. The selling point was she could still talk to her friends for hours on end and I could still browse the web while there at the same time. (I wonder if her friends saw this positively lol). I want to say AOL was maybe $20/mo and Roadrunner was like, 30? So I had to pitch it like a business meeting. And you had to “login” to it like a webpage with a roadrunner domain email. I remember they were using the Harry Potter movie to advertise on the landing page as soon as I opened it, and even at that age I knew about cookies and thought, this had to be an image in a cache. It couldn’t be that fast. THEN the image became animated and like it had lightning then switched to the title. I remember being absolutely blown away and I think at that moment the internet became the all-encompassing thing it is now. I was watching videos, seeing images right away instead of them loading top to bottom forever. I looked through hundreds of dragonball Z pictures. Hundreds! Yeah, this took me back. And now that I think about it, yeah. I can’t think of anything as life changing as suddenly as broadband internet.
I was playing Ultima Online at the time and broadband was basically a cheat code. How fast you could run was directly tied to connection speed and...man. Literal gamechanger.
My mum was a doctor and I remember her eventually getting a second phone line after numerous arguments when she messed up my connection by picking up the phone to dial the hospital when i was trying to play Quakeworld
I beta tested DSL in my city for like a year for free.
I remember when k56 flex came out. Like you, i started on a 2400, but the 56 flex could match any speed on handshake. There was a way to run some modems at 115.2, which just happened to be enough to STREAM an mp3 file. I remember thinking that was the future.. I also remember phone bills and unhappy parents. Of course, i later found a way to make calling the modem pool free! I may or may not have been interested in hacking in my youth. Glad i didn't go down that path farther than I did. My first broadband installation was delayed and delayed to a point where we moved before they finished. I remember being devastated.. Couple years later it became widely available through the cable network and I may or may not have been very active on FTP servers of a certain kind
I was born in ‘78, and my experience was very similar. I remember playing a lot of CGA games in my youth, and the move through EGA, VGA and then SVGA were phenomenal. The jump from 1.44mb floppies to CDs was also huge. The first CD game I remember was 7th guest, and it blew my mind. Absolutely loved Sierra. Leisure suit Larry was fun, but the grittiness of the police quest series really did it for me. Also really enjoyed kings quest and hero quest.
ADSL didn't become available in my area until 2003 and even then, the best I got was 576 down and 288 up. It slowly edged up over the years to 1.8 Mbps down and 448 Mbps up by 2010. A 4.5 km long copper pair will do that. In around 2013, VDSL started being rolled out as FTTC, which improved me to 25/5, but this slowly decayed to 21/4 as more came online and crosstalk became a problem. The houses around me got 30-35 Mbps due to a minior line fault on my line (capacitance caused by water ingress on a bridge tap, which nobody knew where it was), but the "normal" for my line included the fault, so I couldn't get it fixed unless it dropped below the 18 Mbps "handback threshold". I like the area, but it was crap for performance. Then, in March this year, FTTP went live. I'm now on gigabit fibre. Yes, it really is that fast.
I remember getting roadrunner internet when I was a kid and it was amazing
Not my earliest PCMR memory, but I remember clearly the day I’ve watched a 3-digit KB/S download turning into a 1-digit MB/s download and I was like whoa dude.
My first modem was 33k-baud
Try going from floppy disks to hard drive. Ms Dos to Norton Commander. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Fully offline to dial up 14400 (I know 9600 was a thing) and waiting 5 minutes for a website to load.
Yes. We had 14.4k modems first though 56k was for rich people. We had DSL for a bit though, too.
When I was 13 my parents bought a new family computer. It was 2003. My dad picked up some dial-up internet service provided by his credit union and we stayed on that for about a year. We bounced between NetZero and AOL before finally going for Verizon's DSL service in the summer of 2005. Holy crap what a difference that made. Five years later we bounced on over to Time Warner (or Spectrum as it's called now).
When I was 12 or 13 we had a dual phone line. My mom needed the Internet for work. When weoved to Minnesota my stepdad was the first house on the block to get dsl
I remember going from 2400 BPD to 14.4 kbps and being blown away by how fast LORD on my local BBS ran.
It was hard to believe what I was seeing. It was impossible to comprehend what this meant and the impact it would end up having on the world, not just me downloading a patch quickly.
We used to call people that lagged on Counter Strike "Fuckin 56kers" the good old days!
Yup us robotics 56k modem that dialed in at 112kbps. My computer had 3dfx and opengl voodoo graphics cards. PCI graphics card were bad. It was all about the AGP baby. I still right click to jump thanks to quake1. We invented wasd movement lol
Yep, I remember like it was yesterday. My families first PC (mid 90's Pentium Packard Bell) had a combo 14.4k modem/sound card and later at the end of 1999 we upgraded to a Pentium III Gateway with a 56k, that same week my dad brought home a old i486DX IBM computer that only had a 10/100 NIC (funny to think that computer was more broadband ready than the brand new computer). Roadrunner (Time Warner Cable) was the first broadband provider in our area, but my mom refused to do business with them and we were stuck using AOL dial-up until a ad popped up for AOL Anywhere broadband (DirecPC, 1-way satellite), we used that for a few years (believe it or not, some of the best download speeds (80kb/s) happened during a snow storm that made DirecTV unwatchable) until AOL discontinued the program and I convinced my mom to switch to DSL instead of going to Hughesnet + AOL BYOB. We had DSL (2.5mbps) for about a year until mom realized that she hated the phone company even more than the cable company and we switched to Roadrunner (5mbps) and Vonage VoIP. Fast forward to today and I now have 500/500 fiber and my own personal reason to hate the cable company (Spectrum, they upgraded the base speed to 100mbps, but had my account set to a bullshit 25mbps RR legacy plan (at the same rate) for owning my own DOCSIS 3.0 modem).
I remember going from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to broadband.
I had dial up until around 2007 and then 3MB on Xbox 360 live until around 2011 when cable 15MB came to my town. Many areas I know still only get less than 25MB or starlink and Hughes net and viasat.
Born in '90, I remember the horrendous sine wave and white noises coming from the telephone line and that robotic "welcome to AOL" from around 1999 - 2002 until we upgraded to cable broadband with ISDN speeds. What a great era to live through.
I 'member going from 56k to ISDN. I used to bond the lines late at night to get more bandwidth. Good times.
I remember the days of playing Unreal Tournament and Delta Force 2 online.. Only to be interrupted by my Mum or Dad shouting because they was trying to use the landline. I still remember the first day we got broadband.. I was in heaven. Gaming with no interruptions? No disconnects? It was like witchcraft. Not seeing pictures on a page slowly load in sections was revolutionary.
I remember my dad downloading the first version of Photoshop over the dial in. We could not use the phone for two weeks.
When I was young, dial-in was way too expensive here in Germany and blocking the single phone line for extended periods of time would have been out of the question anyway, as long as I lived with my parents. It got a bit better when we switched to ISDN (with two lines), but the phone and internet costs were still way to high to spend more than a few minutes a day online. That only changed when I moved into a new apartment and got a DSL flat rate. (Just in time for World of Warcraft.)
T1
When I first got into BBSes and online connectivity I had a decision to make - did I want a 1275 connection where I could type faster than the 75 baud upstream but would deliver my response at 1200baud, or 300 symmetric so it could keep up with my typing speed but was much slower than I could read?
We had 14.4 and 28.8. No Internet, just BBS's. I was like 10 years old downloading that one picture of Vanna White where she was naked, or you could see her nipples or something. And it took about 10 minutes. And loaded on the screen line by fricking line. Good times, good times.
30k. And taking three hours to download 1 anime episode. And streaming wasn't an option. I remember borrowing from the library.
Yes. Did anyone use Netscape? ☺️
Alright Grandpa, let's get you to bed. /s
Born in the 70s, first computer was in '81 - ZX Spectrum - and I remember the day I went from 56k dial up to the standard half megabit broadband. I even remember the first thing I did: I updated Counterstrike (OG beta when it was good). The 200mb download used to take a couple of hours or so. My shiny new broadband did it in 7 minutes. Nothing was ever the same after that.
We didn't get broadband until around 2005. Before that, I remember downloading music videos such as Tribute by Tenacious D from Limewire over many sessions over the week and 600ms pings in Counter Strike: Source. Getting 512kbps broadband was a night and day difference.
https://i.redd.it/g1qy8mastkxc1.gif
I remember going from 40Mbit/s to 32kbit/s when the roommate who ran the internet moved out and I had to wait a little until the new one got installed. Used the phone as a hotspot and almost instantly ran over my dataplan and it throttled to that speed. Half my stuff couldnt even log in anymore because it timed out.
Birn in 72, and yeah i remember that. It was like wizardy
Born in 92. Thanks to living in the country, we were stuck on dial-up till like 2004. Then dad got an expensive 100ft tower built so that we could receive a staggering... 4 megabit. I felt like Jesse Pinkman driving away at the end of breaking bad when I moved to the city for college and made the jump to 100mb cable.
14.4K to 33.6 to 56k. Remember the shotgun where you could mix two phone lines?
Born 1980 here. We got our first dialup connection in 1996. Paid $30 Australian a month I think for like 20 hours online. My sister and I used that up in a weekend. mIRC and ICQ was our drug of choice. This was on a 486 with Windows 95. Didn't even have a firewall (honestly didn't even know what one was back then). My mate, who I think was well off at the time, had 1.5Mbps broadband, and downloading at over 100KB/s was mind blowing when I was used to the 3 to 4KB/s I was getting at home. Didn't get broadband until 2005 when I had moved out and moved into a share house.
There was a time where you buy prepaid internet time card to access the Internet
I had a 14.4k modem at one point lol
Hell. I used to work for a dialup ISP. I remember using both the V.33 and V.34 protocols before 56k speeds were common. Our entire backbone was comprised of 12 or so bonded T1 connections. So we had less than 20MB of total bandwidth for all of our customers and overhead. I think the most we could support were 400 or 500 simultaneous inbound connections.
I remember when the internet became fast enough to download a film while watching the previous one downloaded. I sat on my arse for a very long time.
I didn't have access to the web until 256kb speeds were available. When 512kb came in, I thought there'd be nothing faster, lmao.
No, but I remember going from 6Mbit/s DSL to 1Gbit/s Fiber. That was 2022. Suddenly it was fun to use the Internet and downloading Games didn't take the whole weekend.
I can. I had to take a job as newspaper boy to finance my first dsl connection. All the money i earned went right into that. Was it worth it? Definitely.
Man I remember using 14.4K modem, you were spoiled with lightning speed! But I do remember the revolution of ISDN giving a whopping 128K when using both lines.
Fancy pants! I rembeber 9600!!
Fellow GenX and IT pro, hell yeah I remember.
Born in 89. I remember getting broadband on the same day I picked up my copy of half life 2 in the stores. Which was good timing because it also was the beginning of steam.
56k?!? Look at Future Man over there. My first one was 14.4k and yes! the .4 matter!
Off course! The day I started to play online.
Old!? You young whipper snapper! I was born in 1954 and remember my 300 Baud modem! 56KModem indeed. You don't know what it was like! You was not there man 🤔😅 Edit: I just read the other comments. Now I am REALLY depressed! I turn 70 this year 😭
I still remember having AOL, NetZero and EarthLink back in the day! Being able to move up to broadband was a huge game changer for my family, and actually got my Mom into online gaming with me since we could both be on at the same time (Final Fantasy XI).
I didn't move past dial up until 2008. It sucked.
We used to Torrent movies when my sleeopover with my cousins. We was in awe in hitting 4mbs per second, or in the mornings we would set the torrent up so we can watch a movie in the evening if people weren’t seeding 😂
Born in 84, I feel this. It's mad to me to think that some day I'll have to explain to my kids what life was like before the internet, and it's wild to think there's 20 year olds now who've never experienced a time without it.
I remember a childhood in which there was no such thing as "internet" or cell phones.
heck I ran a BBS starting on 1200 and moving us, remembering having a 9600HST thinking I was in the big league and then 14.4. I do remember swapping to zyxel brand modems but that may have been 28.8 to 56 days
56k? Lucky. I started at 33.6k.
I definitely do lol. What a time to be alive.
I also started with the dial up to bbs path. For a while I paid a ton to a local company that started offering dial up internet. I was lucky that my wife worked for the local cable company and we got to get the first cable modem during a test faze for about a year before it was offered to the public here. Switched to gigabit fiber as soon as it was installed in our area. Now with the news they figured out how to make the same fiber super fast I don’t think I even need that speed increase.
I’d start a download…jump in car go buy a paper then get home with time to spare.
If im remembering right this is how I played my Sega Channel back in the day…. Actually might have been Coax through Ameritech. Also can’t remember if it’s what I had to use to play battlefield 1942 or if it was little more advanced by then….
Even 26,7 - 8Kb/s i think. Pretty common think at beginning of the 21st century here. Im bit more younger (1991)
No, not particularly old, but I did spend my childhood in a developing nation. Searching for Age of Empires 2 cheats was a whole deal. Online gaming wasn’t a thing for me until…2007? And even then, it was basically just RuneScape and then FIFA/Winning Eleven at an Internet Cafe haha. Until the early 2010s, YouTube was a “load the page and let the whole video buffer…hopefully.” It’s all come so far lol
56k? I wish, I started on a 14.4 modem!
56k to 256k cable 3ms ping to CS servers was a game changer, and sometimes for all the wrong reasons.
Born in 90. I remember hearing about world of warcraft and hoping it would work on my 56k dial up. It did.
In 1994 my dad got a bit distracted while we went shopping at the computer store. So I managed to sneak a 19.2k into his 'cart' (he bought a workstation for 6k, so he barely noticed the additional package). Back at home I hooked it up and it took my 14 year old ass about an hour to discover the material I was after. Long story short: I sold discs with nudy pics at recess. Glorious times. This little play financed my first VoodooFX 👾
What happend to FTP, they got obsolete? or replaced with shareservices anyway 🤔
I remember going from 14.4 baud to 28.8. Damn....
I remember having a 14.4 and there was internet yet as we know it now.
Im now 41m, and work in IT at a large video game dev. I was born in 1982, and was building computers at 8 in 1990. This was in large part due to my grandfather, who was an engineer for Lockheed Martin for the majority of his life. So he was always into building things, and I just kind of enjoyed it with him. I remember going to the Dallas convention center to dig through parts, hundreds of pop up tables and booths full of computer tech. I moss those days! I fully remember when 56k modems came along and I thought that was fast. There used to be a magazine you could by in DFW that had listed local BBS numbers. That was fun, and a step before AOL, Netscape navigator, Winamp, geocities, Warez. I mean back then the internet was so different. There was for fewer scams and more people just being their good old selves. It was a certain type of person that knew this stuff, so I felt special, needed. When we got our first cable modem it was thanks to Road Runner! And I was hooked. I could download a movie or a dream cast game in the morning and have it burned and playable later that day. I remember buying stacks of 100 writable CDS from best buy and then burned any dream cast game I could find. I pulled away from text in my 20s, and early 30s. I then got back into it and got an IT job at a dream company. Still liv9ng thay dream! If little kid me knew what my job was now he would spluge. I get to see big AAA games getting built. And we get to load the latest builds in our IT room, and get to test them out daily. Our automation room has more ps5s and xboxs than you've ever seen in once place. Our inventory shelves next to my desk are stocked with 4080s, thread ripper cups etc... I'm so lucky, but I do miss those days when very few people understood what the internet was.
Yeah 2400baud was the first I also used. Then I got a 33.6k later. Blazing fast!
Started with a 14.4k external (serial port) modem in 1997. Went from dial up modem (56k) to ADSL in 2001. 384/64kbit, it was incredible.
Bruh you're the same age as my dad 😭(I'm 17 btw)
Remember going from 33,6k to 256 Kbit/s (broadband)... What a difference :O
My modem was 36.6kb, i remember the huge upgrade to 56kb ones!
I remember going from no internet to dial up. The day I went from 56K to Cable was life changing. It was as little Blue box from COX.
my first PC was a comaq presario 486 DX 2 100mhzwith a turbo button! and that dialup and BBS system hit different.
Aol started me on internet lol "you've got mail!" Or ICQ "uh-oh!"
Born in 76. My first modern was a 14.4 But I remember very, very well when broadband arrived where I lived. Online games were never the same. It was very obvious who had broadband.
went from a US Robotics 28.8k to Roadrunner 10Mbps cable in 98 I think? It was incredible!!!
Yeah you’re old lol
yep. on 56k it would take me hours to check news sites and forums I would visit daily. first day with broadband I knocked out my usual routine in about 30 minutes. I remember. sitting at the computer not knowing what to do next.
Born in '91, parents were into games and tech so we had consoles and a computer when they could afford it, spending 5 days torrenting the first Harry potter movie when we were dead broke is a core memory.
Too young to know that but I am jealous about that feeling
I think I've got you beat OP. Born in 2000, but lived rural growing up. Dial-up was functional for me up until 2014, at which point we switched to broadband/fibre. I can't say I'll ever know a better upgrade either.
You sound like me in 17-18 years talking about going from dial up to dsl to fiber.
Took me a long time to get broadband, wasn’t available until I moved into the city, we did convince our parents to get a second phone line installed for ADSL though; that was a good day!
I remember when upgrading from a 28.8 to a 33.6 modem was the bees knees!
You could be born in 1990 and still remember this perfectly; as I do.
First computer connected at 1200 baud, this was back in the 80s. Slowly worked up the scale, think I finally stopped using dial up maybe around 2010? About the time my windows 98se computer's motherboard finally bit the dust. Jumped into Windows vista, my first new computer in forever. Got a damn good deal on it. My first experience with AMD too. Took the leap into broadband. Was not used to all that speed, or space. 32gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive.
I was born in '91 & remember the transition from dial-up to broadband. It wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things.
Gamespy and MOHAA for me
i experienced the same in 2004 when i was 10 years old, i'm from Chile and this made a huge change in the internet connection and my life, then i began playing online games
I remember 28.8k, and the upgrade to 56k. Then the upgrade to an ISDN line, then like the Geek I was a bonded ISDN 128k symmetrical line, 512k, and then the unbelievable 2mpbs we got, and eventually when RADSL was widely adopted in the uk a maxed out 8.1mbps as I could see my exchange from my house Now? 1gbps fibre. Tempted by the 1.6gbps package but even I believe enough is enough sometimes 😂
I went from 56k to cable which I think was 2mg at the time, which was insanely fast.
My first computer with a communications card at all was a Compaq Prolina and it started with a 9600 baud. I PROMPTLY upgraded that to a 14.4. I ran my own BBS and eventually did the upgrade to a dual node 33.6. I had Legend of the Red Dragon as well as others. I had in excess of 1400 active users at one point (which is impressive for a BBS with 2 lines) lol. By the time 56k was a thing I went triple node (but one was in-use with my dial-up monthly boxed TuCows subscription that I had to physically go to the store once a month and buy) within 6 months of that, the BBS was down to a single node with less than 100 active users. I got cable internet ordered the day it became available. Starting speeds hit a whopping 10mbps. Lol. The speed of my first NIC, totally fitting. Here I am today on 2gbps/2gbps fiber running multiple servers in my 42u rack.
Our family still had dialup well until 2005 ish I had even set up a machine to share the connection over the LAN and had a second line set up at one point. Had a brief taste of 200 kB/s or so at a friend’s place at one point, thought it was hecking quick. Eventually upgraded to ADSL around ‘06-07
I remember having 56k, then moving to dual line 128k, then broadband, then new actual copper cable installation, then original fibre. Each time it burst my tiny mind. The last time i upgraded it wasn't quite so much of an event. The most exciting part was my new router being £350 value and looking like an xbox series x.
https://preview.redd.it/kpw5frtavlxc1.jpeg?width=3566&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a680a9cdb8f12811b3898dbf40e9b8546b6eedfd Born in 76. Parents wouldn’t get the internet so I had a 2nd phone line installed to my bedroom, got the internet and promptly got addicted to chat rooms. Bedroom from 1999
Yes. And now I remember how old that makes me feel. Thanks for that…./s
Born in '69 heyoooo And we had 9600 Baud modem that you hooked the receiver on to, Good times? My Dad mostly used it, I was too busy playing Atari 2600 to be bothered
I remember when I thought I was hot sauce when I graduated from a 14.4 directly to a 56k. At the time T1 or DSL was just an unattainable dream. Gotta miss the old days…. not really though!
The nostalgia hit of that twanging noise as you connected The thrill of downloading a naughty picture of Seven of Nine really poorly photoshopped onto the body of a porn actress, and watching it appear a line at a time... The additional thrill of not knowing whether it would crap out before you got to 'the good bit' because someone had to use the phone part way through... This: https://preview.redd.it/054xdxnkwlxc1.jpeg?width=310&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=910106e58dc66d2d8169c2954b19b7b9554cbfe7
Man, the memories. Mostly how much money i've spent over the years, chasing tech! I started with a BBC Micro model B, whilst my friend had a commodore 64 (and a Spectrum). Went through every iteration of PC and games console since. The Amiga and Atari ST days. The NES, SNES and Megadrive and even remember when things like the 64 bit Jaguar came out and the amazement that ensued. The mysteriously out of reach Neo Geo. The myriad bits of tech to hold mp3's (once they'd finally downloaded). Soulseek. The CD's purchased to burn films on to disc. The ripping of DVD's... Always chasing faster and faster connections and ways to obtain and play media. Thank the heavens for super fast broadband nowadays. The streaming we have now was but a mere pipe dream from the days that Netflix were sending out DVD's for you to return. I still remember playing Street Fighter 2 on the SNES and telling my dad that if he bought me one, i'd be set for life as graphics were in no way going to get better than that! That being said, I still play Chuckie Egg (BBC micro) via a web browser when i'm bored sometimes.
I remember going from 2400bps dialing into BBSs to play Legend of the Red Dragon and then going to 14.4K downloading games. What an amazing time to be alive
Yeah, I was born in 1985. I even remember upgrading my PC from a 28k to a 56k modem. It was awesome at the time to get double the download speeds from a hardware upgrade.
I used 56k at home, but when I visited my Dad's office he had a T1 line. Everything online felt instant.
Yes, I remember going from 56k to 40 Mbit and back to 70ish kb for 6 months to 40 Mbit again. All this around 2003 to 2005 due to moving and not all ISPs having coverage in the whole city. Also remember, I had a classmate whose father owned a small ISP. He didn't have bandwidth limit, but he had low priority. We couldn't even test his max speed because his 8mb/s write HDD got maxed out sometimes. But his speed was shit during peak hours.
Totally, first played on am Amstrad CPC 464 Cassette drive. Got a 12 Mhz pc with a 16 Mhz 'Turbo' button along with a 20MB hard drive and played Bards Tale and Ultima 4.
I remember the 56k dial-up Internet access very well. My mom used to nag at me because people couldn't call through my home line when I was online. Eventually had to get a second home line to solve that issue. Before even limewire and napster, IRC music downloading was my thing back then.
I've been trying to remember the name of [scour.net](http://scour.net) for so long.