not that i recall, but in the 90s, construction crews would routinely cut backhaul fiber lines and large areas of the country would go offline for most of a day

not that i recall, but in the 90s, construction crews would routinely cut backhaul fiber lines and large areas of the country would go offline for most of a day while they fixed it, literally by stitching the cables back together. i think that's when they started putting markers by all the cables, because it was becoming a real problem. "call before you dig!" or, more commonly, entire sites would be unavailable for a day or two, because everyone ran their servers on insanely expensive and unreliable T1 (or even crappier leased line) connections that were also prone to getting cut. that's when the colo / datacenter / hosting business really took off, because imagine running something that makes you money and relying on your local shitbox CLEC telco to deliver it for you. untenable at best. for example, i remember a guy who ran a small gaming server outfit on a set of 56k leased lines running out of his garage. if you ran a clan, you could pay him for low-latency practice space. that was considered a legitimate internet business, cutting edge and visionary, even. i think it was a side business, and took off when the industry matured a little more and he could actually deliver decent solutions at consumer prices. aside from basic nostalgia, those were not the good ol days. in fact, it pretty much sucked. flakey hardware, buggy software, slow-as-shit networking, no wifi ... the struggle was real. these days, everything that comes out blows your fucking mind at how fast, reliable, high quality, and cheap it is. imagine waiting years for an incremental improvement in bandwidth instead of ridiculous shit like google fiber replacing your good-enough 100 megabit cable ISP. it's much better now in absolute terms, no matter how much people complain. and i'm only in my early 30s, i got an early start, but to someone in their 50s it must be mind-bending how much progress has been made.