5 ms·
Not 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 e
by antisthenes 10y ago
Not 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.
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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...
- chiph 10y ago> almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. Umm. Porn?
- some-guy 10y agoRealPlayer video rips of my favorite TV shows for me, all in wonderful 160p!
- jff 10y agoA year or two ago, I went through some old files that had somehow followed me all through highschool. Among them were a handful of music and video files I got from friends passing around burned CDs. I was quite amused to play some random episode of Dragonball Z and have it pop up a postage-stamp sized video on my relatively high-res modern screen!
- ChuckMcM 10y agoOr to have your kid say "Dad, why are there video thumbnails in the archive directory and where are the actual videos?"
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago> 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. I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by many years. You'd download it off of an FTP server somewhere. At one point, the majority of my hard drive was devoted to half a dozen videos that I'd show to everyone who came over. Basically, watching a video on your computer felt new and exciting and worth waiting for. I'd never do that today even if I were stuck on a slow pipe, but at the time it was oddly compelling.
- monocasa 10y agoOr that stupid dancing baby CGI that blew up in the late nineties for some reason.
- bitwize 10y agoIt was a demo of Autodesk's Biped bone-animation software. It really took off when the producers of Ally McBeal licensed the baby to appear on their show. That always reminds me: Earlier that decade, a major plot arc of Beverly Hills 90210 featured a nightclub called Peach Pit After Dark. The door of the club had a flying toaster, from the PC screensaver After Dark.
- bobbles 10y agoI spent like a week downloading individual music videos over 28K. People will do a lot of things
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Shalhoub 10y ago> Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Someone doesn't agree with your comment, but rather than come back with a refutation they voted you down instead :) And someone else don't agree with my comment .. modded down -4
- antisthenes 10y agoIf I cared about karma or being modded down, I wouldn't post on the Internet, at all. If people chose to download porn over 28.8k modems, that's their choice. Just seems like a waste of time, that's all. Probably quicker just to take your dad's nudie mags rather than wait 6 hours for a 400x300 jpeg.
- grzm 10y agoLikely because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation, and the guidelines ask not to comment on downvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- NikolaNovak 10y agoHmm, either your experience, or memory, of the nineties / dial-up, is different than mine and all of my (quickly polled friends). We all built a library of painfully-obtained 320x200 horrible overcompressed video... ahh, the memories of RealPlayer. Some video was down to 180p... heck, I still have videos that were one or two megabytes in size in my archives - that I darn tootin' well waited hours to download :)
- 72deluxe 10y agoPlease don't mention RealPlayer again. I feel ill and queasy thinking of that piece of software, its million rewrites and the CPU hog they released for Linux (at least on my lame hardware). I remember using "download accelerators" to try and grab files faster back in the day. Who knew they were just doing 4 simultaneous downloads of ranges of the same file eh? Ah I feel old
- mod 10y agoAs I recall, the download managers were primarily useful because they could resume files that didn't finish. Incredibly useful for enormous files like visual basic 6, which I spent like...a month or so downloading in the late 90s.
- ajdlinux 10y agoTIL the RealPlayer brand still exists... http://www.real.com http://www.real.com
- nommm-nommm 10y agoCan confirm, I remember downloading anime clips at 6 or so hours apiece! Not even full episodes, clips! And it was amazing! And before there was YouTube there was flash videos/animations on Newgrounds. The people I hung with back then were into animutations.
- tastythrowaway2 10y agoWe drink ritalin!
- bigbugbag 10y agoIIRC in 1997 (was it 1996?) this thing called webcasting made lifecasting possible, Jennicam and Amandacam come to mind. Then there was stileproject and its treasure trove of videos, Not mentioning internet porn videos that people burned onto CDs to sell to people without internet. Internet video has been a thing a while before youtube got released hoping to capture enough of this thing through offering to host it for free in the hope to be bought later by one of the big players.
- acdha 10y agoTwo minor points: GPRS is 36-112Kbps and EDGE is faster still, so the 90s modem comparison seems apt to me. Latency is terrible so the player page loading slowly but the actual video playing is entirely plausible since that's the best case network traffic profile. Other technological improvements help, too: H.264 is much better than the codecs like MPEG-1 used for things like the infamous exploding whale video. The bigger point was simply that people will wait for things they want. Not being able to load instantly changed the style of interaction but not the desire to listen to or watch things and there's far more content available than there used to be. Tell teenagers that the cool music video is available and you'll find a lot of slow downloads over their entire day at school, work, etc.