Re:The internet is an SEO landfill
by scarface74 on Sunday June 23, 2019 @04:40PM
(#20258521)
I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup.
It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful.
Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere.
I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
Yeah, I remember the times I didn't dare move because it might kill my download, back before resuming and download managers were a thing. Still, costly things feel more valuable, so I'd take a good hard look at what I really wanted before I committed to an 18 hour download for an installer ISO, and I'd certainly use it. Ubiquitous availability diminishes perceived value, for me at least. The large shift was from dialup/ISDN to DSL, I think, because it gave me more than ten times the speed (instead of the small increased with 9.6 => 14.4 => 28.8 => 56k => 64k).
Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.
Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the internet much more interesting back then.