Comment by icedchai
16 hours ago
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
16 hours ago
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
I literally remember watching images load line by line.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
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Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.