Comment by ec109685
8 hours ago
This article makes it seems like 1996 was ancient times. There was the internet then, browsers, Mac’s had a tcp stack for a while by then, quake was an extremely advanced game.
Yeah, the dos to windows transitions was a big deal, but it was a pretty ripe time for innovation then.
Yeah, but dial-up was slow, laggy, and what 95% of people used to access the internet in those days. Real-time gaming was not fun with anything that used it. I grew up in a rural area in the 1990s and was no match for people that started to get cable modems as time went on.
Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.
> Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.
It was laggy as there was buffering and some compression (at least for later revisions of dial-up) that most definitely added latency.
Dialup has a ton of latency (100+ms), but little jitter.
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You're using confusing terminology so you look very wrong. What you mean to say is direct modem-to-modem connections were not laggy because there was no packet switching. This is a true statement.
What the GP comment was talking about was dial-up Internet being most people's exposure to TCP/IP gaming in the 90s. That was most assuredly laggy. Even the best dial-up Internet connections had at least 100ms of latency just from buffering in the modems.
The QuakeWorld network stack was built to handle the high latency and jitter of dial-up Internet connections. The original Quake's network was fine on a LAN or fast Internet connection (e.g. a dorm ResNet) but was sub-par on dial-up.
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