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I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
by swanson 10y ago
I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
- antisthenes 10y agoOne wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.
- yellowapple 10y agoIn my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.
- discreteevent 10y agoThey don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.
- Raed667 10y agoif you have that kind of speed you watch Youtube in 144p !
- 77pt77 10y agoI have done that many times and it's doable for most things that don't have hard-coded subs.
- acdha 10y agoThis was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.
- antisthenes 10y agoNot sure what your comment has to do with mine. I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email. Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day. While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower! And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...
- lacampbell 10y agoI live in the first world and I rarely watch videos at 480p. I have 100gb of bandwidth a month, and typically view YouTube at 360.
- derefr 10y ago> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then. + Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2GB hard drive was now 100% full.
- throwawayish 10y agoA Pentium II can play a DVD back at 24 fps back no problems.
- 5ilv3r 10y agoThat's because the pentium 2 chip isn't decoding the video. Try it with a software decoder some time. It hardly works. I had to disable video scaling before my 366 would stop dropping frames.
- mhurron 10y ago> three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s Ah Napster.
- antisthenes 10y agoYes, my point was specifically about videos, and I've elaborated on it further in the post above. I, too, remember quite vividly waiting 30-40 minutes to download a 5MB installer for WinAmp and ICQ. I honestly wouldn't even know where to look for videos in the 90s internet. Most people probably didn't have the upload speed to even consider sharing them online.
- ensignavenger 10y agoI think shockwave.com hosted Flash animated videos. Also, I remember downloading Troops from TheForce.net, seems like they had several other fan made videos. I also remember watching the Star Wars Episode I trailer on StarWars.com (I beleive it required the QuickTime plugin); so anyway, those are some sites hosting video content in the 90s.
- snarfy 10y agoI'm guessing you've never downloaded porn from usenet over a 2400 baud modem.
- antisthenes 10y agoI have not. That was a little bit before my time. The first modem I've had the luxury of using was a 33.6K.
- madgar 10y agoPerhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place. I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)
- bbcbasic 10y agoErotic literature?
- swiley 10y agoWhen I had a slow connection I loved tools like youtube-dl because they didn't expect to be used interactively. Network tools like browsers that just assume they can monopolize your time are probably the most frustating things in these situations.
- nindalf 10y agoYouTube-dl helped a lot when I was living in a rural town a few years ago. I would download a bunch of tutorials over the weekend when I visited my parents in the city and watch them course of the week. Seems strange to say now, because this was the case only 3-4 years ago and only a few hundred km from where I currently live. Today I can't imagine watching in anything less than HD.
- emondi 10y agoI save the links to download later at some other place and view offline. Before I had ssh access to a server from a friend who copied what I downloaded (he also copies whole debian repositories for me).
- barkingcat 10y ago3 hours is so low in the grand scheme of things. It used to take 3 hours to download a jpg over dialup ...
- 72deluxe 10y agoI used to rely on PC Plus and cover CDs for all of my software needs. I remember needing Qt for Linux (it was all new to me) and spending hours downloading a 16MB file, only to be grabbing the non-devel RPM. We take file sizes for granted these days.
- andrepd 10y agoWhy do you need 480p? 144p/240p was the standard YouTube less than 10 years ago.
- vacri 10y ago> Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. Right there in the same link, it says that the video page was a megabyte. It's the sentence directly after the 'two minutes' but. The sentence even has some 'all caps' words in it - even skimming, your eye is drawn to it. Why on earth did you stop reading halfway through the penultimate paragraph?
- AstralStorm 10y agoYouTube still has 240p mode for that very reason, they just do not advertise it in the UI. The modern codecs make these super compressed video and sound relatively watchable.