Oh, yes. A fervent amen to that.
I do remember those yelped 'Don't Pick Up The Phone' commands, invariably called out in a voice verging on the panic-stricken ...
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Dial-up Internet Sound
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Oh, yes. A fervent amen to that.
I do remember those yelped 'Don't Pick Up The Phone' commands, invariably called out in a voice verging on the panic-stricken ...
You mean secs right? I sure never had to wait 45 min to connect on dial up. More like 45 min to download just one song.
Probably means minutes of continuously trying to connect. I've been there before.
Never been an AOL sub but there weren't unlimited modem ports, so he could have been referring for a 45 minute period of getting busy signals before getting connected.
Oh yea. Forgot about that. I remember sometimes the modem would call three numbers until I finally connect. 45 minutes is crazy though.
Fun! I’ve still got a 14.4/16.8 USR stashed in a box-o-stuff up in storage (I remember the excitement going from 1200 >> 2400, etc.
) I was in the SYSOP program, so I used to get the discount rate on new modems for running a BBS.That same box should have a Jaz drive, some Jaz, Bernoulli and Zip media, probably 500+ 3.5” floppies with PC, Atari and Amiga apps.
That brings me back to the days of BBSs', As great as technology is, and how much its improved. There was something special during those days. Ahhhh the good ole days
In some ways I miss the days of the BBS. I ran one on a Commodore before switching over to that great IBM 286 machine. I remember the 300 bps modems and even the cradle modems that you had to put your phone handset in. I think I may make that sound one of my text notifications.
No need to feel nostalgic. Just check out the Telnet BBS Guide for the latest list of BBS systems you can reach via Telnet.
That brings me back to the days of BBSs', As great as technology is, and how much its improved. There was something special during those days. Ahhhh the good ole days
Agreed. And the Internet was all text. No ads. No annoying pop-ups, pop-unders, or YouTube video ads.
Agreed. And the Internet was all text. No ads. No annoying pop-ups, pop-unders, or YouTube video ads.
Reminds me of conversations I had both online and offline in about '92 or '93 with people who felt the introduction of image capabilities in Web browsers was going to be mean the end of the beautiful text-based Internet that they knew and loved. And man, some of those guys evem hated the X Windows System... with a passion, in fact!
I suppose ANSI is nice, but it would be hard pressed to deliver the full experience we've become accustomed to...
If you ever wondered what hell is like, it's basically this video playing in a never ending loop.
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Ah yes. The world as we knew it in 1997, when there was only about 70 million people online. Today, there's an estimated 2.937 billion online.
Teens react to the '97 video:
The teens react to the sound of a modem connecting at about 6:43...
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My family was on AOL at this time with a dedicated internet phone line and a homemade Windows 3.1 PC that my uncle made for us. He still makes PC's to this day and sells them. I honestly cannot remember what I used the internet for at that time. I do remember getting AOL promotional cd's in the mail, it seems every week they were upgrading to a newer version and offering more free hours. It was to the point where they were advertising 5,000 trial hours for free.
AOL... I remember a guy on the Internet that was attempting to "collect enough AOL floppy disks to reach the moon". He'd ask people to mail him the free AOL setup floppies they'd receive for free, the ones that had the free 5,000 hours offer on it. AOL would mail them out, and lots of PC mags would have an AOL floppy pasted inside the magazine. They were everywhere. I never heard if the guy reached his goal...
I used a dialup ISP in the early '90s, but in '95 I leased a T1 line and then began reselling dialup access. There was no local number for AOL or any other ISP, so I had a good number of customers despite living in a very rural area.
Before Win95 came out (with its built in tcp/ip software), a lot of Windows 3.x users were willing to pay $100 for "Internet in a Box", a commercial tcp/ip software package that included a licensed Netscape browser and SLIP and PPP dialup software. I put together a package of freeware SLIP/PPP software, but it required the user to do his/her own configuration of netmask, gateway, etc. I remember going to one guy's house to help him set it up. He was running Microsoft Bob on his PC. That was the first and only time I ever saw anyone actually using that monstrosity!
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One of the local ISPs put this two-minutes-to-load imagemap monstrosity on its homepage in 1996...
I remember fondly how relatives would complain about how they couldn't call my house because I was on the internet.
I remember first getting broadband in 2001. Now THAT was a huge upgrade. It was like a whole new world opened up. I remember watching my dad install an Ethernet card in our old PC, I didn't know enough about computers to help him as I was still young. Funny, looking back at it, that's not something my dad would ever be doing today, if there's anything new in technology I'm the one to set it up for him. And he's not even that techie of a person, he sucks with computers and can barely navigate a browser. I can't for the life of me imagine why he was so eager for broadband in 2001 that he actually installed an Ethernet card to do it, especially now that I realize how bad with computers he actually is. (And don't get any weird ideas for his motive, that computer was in my parents master bedroom )
)
Maybe he just wanted the phone line back again, to make calls.
Nah that definitely wasn't it, we had a separate phone line for America Online.
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I remember fondly how relatives would complain about how they couldn't call my house because I was on the internet.
Wasn't that one of the early selling points of the internet?
Can't think of anything less nostalgic than dial-up sounds.
I still feel stupid for only getting broadband in 2006.
I still feel stupid for only getting broadband in 2006.
Oh, gosh, yes. I remember informing - no, instructing - colleagues/friends/relatives - especially the ones who had adopted the use of digital cameras early (well, as it happens, I still haven't abandoned film) - not to send me any photographs/ attachments via the internet (the old 'shall I send you a few from my wedding/holiday/work conference' all led to a resoundingly negative response from me).
In fact, the length of time it took to download any sort of image drove me nuts; it took me years (even long after I had installed broadband) to get over my dislike of images sent online ...
I remember fondly how relatives would complain about how they couldn't call my house because I was on the internet.
Oh, yes. Those are conversations I recall well. "For some reason, your phone was busy for what seemed like hours; you must have been having a long conversation with someone..." (cue inviting silence to fill the information deficit which I invariably shrugged off with, "Oh, I was probably online at the time").
Yes, I got it pretty late myself, and was also kicking myself for my tardiness in the matter. My father had been a telecoms engineer in the state telephone posts & telegraphs department (or, what had once been such a department before it was partially privatised), and had always been very much to the forefront of telephone technology, priding himself on being ahead of trends, and fashions and remaining very much on top of technological break throughs. However, the internet revolution - kicking in, in domestic settings, as it did, after he retired, - caught him unawares, although he tried, gamely, to keep up.
Hence, he never really mastered it, to what I think was his eternal regret, as he would have been an expert had this revolution in technology happened when he was 20 years younger. I suspect that he also feared the possibly mounting cost of installing - and maintaining - broadband, on a pensioner's salary.
We did this extremely high band-width development for an NFL team that was partially subsidized by a broadband company.
Hahaha, the cable modems at the time were these huge monstrosities with giant fins [heat sinks] that radiated more heat than an oven! Their idea (which we adamantly disagreed with...) was to promote the better high speed experience, er, I guess by making the low speed just _terrible_.
Well, on a broadband connection, the site was pretty outstanding, but on dialup? Holy smokes, talking like 3 minute (or longer!) loads on pages, some would never load
We wound up getting the NFL team to cover the costs to develop a low bandwidth version.Cool stuff though, way before consolidation of internet services for the NFL, couldn’t do video so did X and O play recreations (by “rotoscoping” on video), pretty cutting edge for the 90s
"Girotel Offline" 1200 baud
It was true MAGIC!!! From 1986 on I used the first commercial banking product from Postbank "Girotel Offline" in The Netherlands on a Philips P3105 XT using a 1200 baud modem. Paying bills became having more fun in those days...
That brings me back to the days of BBSs', As great as technology is, and how much its improved. There was something special during those days. Ahhhh the good ole days
It was true MAGIC!!! From 1986 on I used the first commercial banking product from Postbank "Girotel Offline" in The Netherlands on a Philips P3105 XT using a 1200 baud modem. Paying bills became having more fun in those days...
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