Comment by vidarh

Didn't do that, but one of my earliest "dynamic" websites ca mid 90's would have a CGI try to ping the client with a short timeout, and if we got an answer that indicated a leased line or something rather than dialup and we'd serve up a heavy animated version of our logo instead of a static image... But could be used as a vague indicator of distance too.

Trickiest part of doing that today is so many fewer hosts are reachable via icmp, so you'd probably be better off serving up an initial response with some JS to measure more accurately.

(Another silly little thing we added was a link back to a users own ISP from the top ten or so of our competitors based on net block - got us a worried phone call from one of them who thought we'd been hacked and wanted to make sure we didn't think he was responsible)