Comment by myself248

8 days ago

And imagine if telecom had topped out around ISDN somewhere, with perhaps OC-3 (155Mbps) for the bleeding-fastest network core links.

We'd probably get MP3 but not video to any great or compelling degree. Mostly-text web, perhaps more gopher-like. Client-side stuff would have to be very compact, I wonder if NAPLPS would've taken off.

Screen reader software would probably love that timeline.

19 comments

myself248

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iberator  8 days ago

you are wrong. Windows 3.11 era used CPUs with like 33mhz cpu, and yet we had TONS of graphical applications. Including web browsers, Photoshop, CAD, Excel and instant messangers

Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.

  • vidarh  8 days ago

    I don't see how this contradicts any of what they said, unless they've edited their comment.

    You're right we had graphical apps, but we did also have very little video. CuSeeMe existed - video conferencing would've still been a thing, but with limited resolution due to bandwidth constraints. Video in general was an awful low res mess and would have remained so if most people were limited to ISDN speeds.

    While there were still images on the web, the amount of graphical flourishes were still heavily bandwidth limited.

    The bandwidth limit they proposed would be a big deal even if CPU speeds continued to increase (it could only mitigate so much with better compression).

    • iberator  7 days ago

      i remember watching adult videos on windows 3.11 with 486dx 100mhz. CD-ROM VIDEO thing. I guess it was just just mpeg2 format

  • rbanffy  8 days ago

    > Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.

    JavaScript is innocent. The people writing humongous apps with it are the ones to blame. And memory footprint. A 16 MB machine wouldn’t be able to hold the icons an average web app uses today.

    • bitwize  8 days ago

      Netscape was talking about making the Web an app platform to replace Microsoft Windows even way back then. The world we're living in today is exactly what they envisioned.

      2 replies →

rm30  8 days ago

I remember when I went from 286 to 486dx2, the difference was impressive, able to run a lot of graphical applications smoothly.

Ironically, now I'm using an ESP32-S3, 10x more powerful, just to run Iot devices.

petra  8 days ago

It's probably possible to develop analog adsl chips in 1990 semi tech. But pretty difficult.

drob518  8 days ago

Depends how pervasive OC3 would have gotten. A 1080p video stream is only about 7 Mbps today.

  • fhars  8 days ago

    You only have to bundle about 110 ISDN channels to transfer that (four E1 or five T1 trunk lines).

    • myself248  7 days ago

      Right, but point is, assume the "backbone" never got fast enough to have a million subscribers all doing that at once.

      I remember a subscriber T1 costing 4 figures per month, and I don't think it's because the copper pairs themselves were any different. (They weren't. As long as they didn't have bridge-taps, it was just plain old pairs. The repeaters every few kilofeet were not that expensive either.)

      I remember the early-90s internet guidance that idle traffic like keepalive pings was discouraged, especially if you were sending traffic overseas, because it cluttered up the backbone links with packets that weren't actually valuable, and that was rude / abusive. Presumably edge CDNs would've still happened (or, ISPs providing Usenet servers basically did a lot of that already), but you simply wouldn't be doing video over the internet at large because the bandwidth charges would kill you.

      2 replies →