5 kilobit per second should be fine for IRC. A typical PRIVMSG command is what, 200 bytes or so, which gives space for three PRIVMSGs in a second. IRC doesn't compress, but it's also not particularly wasteful with bandwidth.

I meant 5 kilo bytes. Of course that speed is screamingly fast for IRC, but for most of the internet you're left with a completely unusable experience. Try loading Slack on a 5kB connection for example and post back your results in a week! :-)

Lets be real though, nobody actually enjoyed dialup speeds. Sure, we were lucky we had the internet at all but when cable and DSL came around it was a breath of fresh air.

I don't miss the speed, but I miss what the speed enforced. Pages were lighter and less wasteful with resources. These days you have pages that will not load without JS enabled, which is sometimes 10x or 100x the actual content it's displaying. That's not to mention images - people happily throw in a 1MB image, because why not? A 10MB gif to replaces a 1MB video, because why not?

Of course there are still people in remote areas, poorer Countries, low-signal zones, etc, who actually do have to deal with this daily. I remember reading a while back how Youtube and Facebook were completely unusable for some users because of this - not because of the actual content they are delivering.

My old laptop with win 7 cant run youtube 144p (anymore). It just freezes up. If I download the videos in lubuntu, vlc plays the 720p but 480p is all I need. There is clearly nothing wrong with the hardware.

I think a lot of that is GPU acceleration of the video codecs.

mbasic.facebook.com

> nobody actually enjoyed dialup speeds

When downloading files, there was a lot of waiting involved, but if you were dealing with email without attachments, usenet, IRC, and some of the older chat platforms like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger, yahoo messenger, etc. the lack of speed wasn't really noticable.

These days, most websites and online platforms like Slack won't work at dial-up speeds.

Usenet could take quite a while to download your messages. All text websites and IRC were reasonable by the time of 33.6kbaud modems, but even by 1995 most websites had some graphics to download which were always painful. It only got slower from there as more was added each year.

This episode of computer chronicles may remind you of the joy and horror of that time period. Note that most of these people are actually on corporate networks not dialing in... and its still horrendously slow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf6kVEN1lbk

I remember waiting many seconds as images visibly loaded from top to bottom, or with the progressive quality multiple passes.

Seconded that no one enjoyed it. We all looked enviously at the people at companies and universities with their better hookups.