I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
161–170 of 240 posts
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#162Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback…
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern". Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#163> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilo bits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard: 33.6 kbit/s (a later addition) 31.2 kbit/s (a later addition) 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it) 26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice) 24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this) 21.6 kbit/s (apparently this was ver…
I was born in 1996, this is like a bedtime story to me. I had AOL as a kid because my family was poor, but I do not remember any of the numbers. Please post more cool stuff like this.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I remember it. For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas. Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time. 56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"),…
My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.
Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#165Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback…
> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway)
The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.
Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.
I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern". Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.
There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make a name for themselves, and nothing will really stop people from wanting to do that. If your frustration is people using a certain technology simply for the sake of it being new, you should be focused on convincing them that isn't necessary to make good/useful tech and make a name for themselves, rather than insulting them for having general ambition.
"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#167Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback…
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern". Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
Stuff like camera live streams are possible even without HTML. I remember one that used an infinitely-loading GIF. You'd just visit the GIF file directly and it would show you the livestream. It was awesome.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#168Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#169Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback…
And the only reason she doesn’t have access to higher bandwidth is because rural America and conservatives consistently vote for politicians who cut funding for it…. Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
I see what you're getting at, but that doesn't explain bandwidth deserts in parts of rural California. They might have local conservative representatives, but the state leadership is obviously not conservative.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#170Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback…
> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser. Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version. I left lo…
Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.