7 ms·

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second. But o

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG instead of GIF, MozJPEG compression for JPEGs, SVG for vector graphics, CSS for reducing repeated code and getting rid of table-based layouts, etc. But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post. It's this sort of nonsense that is partly the genesis for ideas like Gemini, a return to Gopher, or my own KyuWeb; limit the capabilities of the medium to vastly improve its speed and legibility. This sort of thing isn't exclusive to the web, either. Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? I really love the web, but sometimes it does piss me off a bit.

tracerbulletx 4y ago
I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?
- 121789 4y ago
  Yeah I agree. Lots more bloat now, but I'm not often waiting for images to render or sites to load in general
- gonehome 4y ago
  Yeah - I think people forget, things were really slow back then.
- PaulKeeble 4y ago
  No doubt the modern web is faster even on moderate xDSL connections. I remember web pages taking half a minute to load, even relatively basic ones. The 56k v90 was quite a bit quicker than 14.4k too. Its not even close to similar I remember watching JPG images gradually progress through their low quality versions upwards. Pages were a lot lighter back then but still much much slower than today.
- FredPret 4y ago
  I remember images loading one line at a time. Now I can stream 4k video. Not sure what OP is on about. There is lots of bloat but we are now on a jumbo jet and we used to be on a hot-air balloon
  - 13of40 4y ago
    Somewhere around 1998 or 1999 I was working as a web developer and I listened to a pitch from a guy who wanted to build a video streaming site. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out who was going to pay a subscription to watch grainy, postage-stamp sized videos in a web browser, but apparently that sort of thing took off.
- numpad0 4y ago
  My working theory is that slow behaviors are preferred because else people gets startled.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Latency was also a contributing factor. 56K modem latency is about 200 to 300ms higher than latency on a pure digital connection (ISDN, 56K frame relay, 56K DDS, etc.)
abxytg 4y ago
> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much cooler and better than anything the 90s had.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Pretty much none. I used Word 97 well into the early 2000's. In the early 90's, my Amiga ran a decent word processor in 1 meg of RAM. Software expands to consume whatever resources are available: memory, disk, CPU, bandwidth...
  - pixl97 4y ago
    It may be a different answer than you expect... A lot less developer time spent making sure the application fit in a tiny amount of memory. Of course that sucks for you as a user when an application takes up 4+GB of memory for no reason (I'm looking at you Teams). But for the company that writes it, it is great. Compile and ship, no more weeks or months of trying to shave off every bit so you can fit this in 16MB of RAM, or on just a few floppies. You have a big customer that will sign a 10 million+ contract if you add feature X? Sorry, no way to make that work in under 105KB, which means we can't ship it.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others. It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.
dilyevsky 4y ago
> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection
- lisper 4y ago
  Same here. I have very clear memories of dismissing the WWW as useless for exactly this reason. Those memories are 30 years old so they may not be entirely accurate, but the principle of embarrassment [1] lends them some support if you buy into that sort of thing. [1] https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarrassment/ https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarras...
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    I don't know about you guys but I got a hell of a lot done on a 56K modem all the way up until the mid-2000s. Hell, I was even doing group content on City of Heroes from the dial-up connection I had while working my night-shift hotel job, and the game played surprisingly well given the bandwidth and latencies I had.
- Topgamer7 4y ago
  I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image. Generally pages loaded great.
  - Isamu 4y ago
    Ha, me too, I turned off images back then and it made everything snappy and very pleasant. I just wanted the text, the information. It’s weird though- people want all the nonsense. More and more that is the primary use of the web.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    you guys should try and dig up some old home movies of using the computer back in the 90s Nowadays if something isn't a bloated pile of trash, it'll literally load up in a few dozen milliseconds or less. Back then, even a pretty lightweight text-only site would take seconds to load and render (and of course, bloated crap sites back then took upwards of a minute to load if you left images on)
leeoniya 4y ago
it would feel a lot faster if you could live with viewing max res 640x480 or 800x600 images on your 4k display
Cyberdogs7 4y ago
Your screen name forced me into a double take, as it's very rare for me to come across a similar name. On topic, the idea of performance optimization seems to be completely lost in large sectors of modern day computer science. My recent experience being windows. I have several old laptops that had been rendered completely unusable through windows updates [one even stopped charging]. However, once replacing windows with Ubuntu, they 'feel' like some of the fastest machines I have. Hell, even the one that wouldn't charge, now charges and works like a charm. It's sad to think of all the waste, physical, electrical, and economical, that stems from poorly optimized code.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  When product managers come to me and demand I make the <select> look a certain way to fit in with the rest of the "design language", I end up having to re-write all of the base and edge cases and accessibility and theming of what's already a perfectly functioning UI component. That code gets shipped to every user. And that's just one component... tomorrow I will make the <input type="checkbox"> look a certain way. Probably hundreds of KB just building these base UI components to fit in with some "design goal" that will change again in 6 months. If it makes the app unusable for some (unmeasured) percentage of our users on featurephones in developing countries, they don't care, because the product managers making these decisions will be gone in 6 months too, replaced with another with the same attitudes. At least the app "looks nice"!
powersnail 4y ago
> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I don't know, perhaps the internet I had was just too shit, but it was so much slower than what I get now. I remember when the progress bar was actually meaningful when loading a pure text webpage; and I don't get that today unless I'm using a phone inside an elevator.
onion2k 4y ago
But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post. A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definitely much bigger, and arguably bloated with unnecessary junk, but they still download faster than they did in the 14.4kbps days. Bandwidth speed and page sizes don't explain why you think the web was faster decades ago. I think it's more likely that you're just wrong. I remember using the web in 1995 on a 28kbps modem (such speed!), and it was slow as hell. It was genuinely click-a-link-and-get-cup-of-tea slow a lot of the time. Not only wasy connection awful, a lot of hosting companies were slow too. Servers would throttle and kill sites that used too much bandwidth. Pages often failed to load compared to today. I still used it of course because it was amazing, but I didn't enjoy it. Surfing wasn't really possible. Uploading anything was a pipedream. When I went to uni in 1997 and got access to broadband for the first time it was a revelation. The web became truly useful. I had my first website up and running 3 months later and I've never looked back...
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  Speaking factually, I guess you have to be correct and nostalgia is tainting my memories. Maybe my standards were also much lower then, so a ten-second page load was less offensive then than it is now.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  A 200-character text post was not 10KB. Tons of useful information was available in pure text. Also, most webpages were loading in far less than 500ms on a newer modems, 56k. More importantly, a lot of pure-text pages were focused on providing dense information that you would read for minutes. The load time was negligible in comparison. Today information density on the web is the opposite.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  yeah but the web on a campus intranet mid 90s was super fast. i think you both have valid points.
Dove 4y ago
I can echo the sentiment. I would love to start over and save only the good stuff. With that said, I am wary of my memory of the web of the 90's because everything was so new. There are games I remember loving and seeing no serious flaws in twenty-five years ago, that I now go back to at original resolutions and original framerates and find completely unplayable. But having no point of comparison, what I was enthralled by at the time wasn't necessarily excellent control or excellent design -- it was being able to move in virtual 3d space at all. My dad tells a similar story about Atari's Pong in the 1970's. Everyone was so excited by being able to control something on the TV screen that nothing else about the experience really mattered by comparison. When the web became popular, the prospect of being able to interact with like-minded people anywhere in the world and from all walks of life and in communities of a size and power and with resources otherwise impossible -- it was all so new. And when I remember the time, I remember that. I didn't care about having to log into web sites on every visit. I didn't care about replicating data across devices. I didn't care about unprofessional web pages. I didn't care that everything was under construction, the design was universally bad, and that things often broke. I didn't care that any interaction had to go back to the server. I didn't care that pages were typically pretty static, and exploring meant constantly finding new ones rather than connecting with an author or community. But if you dropped me back in the 90's now, I would care about all of that stuff. I'm not defending the bloated and the awful. I often install video games now and think "GIGAbytes? What on earth FOR??" I often work on software now and see chains of chains of chains of dependencies and despair that we have clearly lost our way. Web sites crowded with ad-blocker defeating ads make me wish for the days when they would merely blink at you, rather than waiting 15 seconds and then starting up a video with sound in some random corner of the site. I do feel like if someone made me emperor, I could start over and do it right. I do wish we could all collectively agree to just not suck. I'm just very skeptical that going back in time is quite as awesome as memory would lead one to expect.
dizhn 4y ago
I remember the name of one particular jpeg I downloaded. We used to go to the school lab, start the download, put a paper sign on the monitor asking people not to turn it off and come back later for our new jpeg. (It was atol.jpeg)
icedchai 4y ago
The web has gotten much faster. I remember waiting around for at least 5 to 10 seconds for pages to load over 14.4K. Still, modern web sites are incredibly bloated. There was a period in the late 90's where I had an early cable modem connection (3 megabits.) All sites were still built for dialup, so things loaded at lightning speed. In general, I'd say effective speeds have remained constant since the early 2000's since site bloat has kept pace with increasing broadband speeds.
ookblah 4y ago
Yeah...56k felt plenty slow back then. Biggest jump for me that gave me that wow factor was when we went from 56k to a "cable modem".
the_third_wave 4y ago
> a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second Nope, that'd be a 14 Mbit modem, a relatively high speed for ADSL modems and not something you'd be able to push through those rusty barbed wire fences which make up some of those old PSTN installations. I guess you mean the 14.4k modem has a theoretical speed of 14.400 bits per second.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I remember taking 24 hours to download something like an IDE or the JDK. No way could I do a clean Maven build of one of the projects I work on now with late 90's download speeds.
- icedchai 4y ago
  In the late 90's, you would've been forced to have a smaller set of dependencies, both out of necessity and because they didn't exist. In the early Java apps I worked on, we downloaded all the dependencies manually, generally from a shared drive or CVS repo, and put them in our classpath.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    Yeah exactly, I would typically have a directory with all the dependencies that I downloaded one by one and use that as part of the classpath, whereas now I do mvn clean install --download-the-internet
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Guess who is paying for all that increased nonsense. Hint: It is not the "tech" companies orchestrating its delivery. It is true this problem is not limited to bandwidth. The same applies to RAM, secondary storage and in some cases CPU. Who pays for the increased nonsense that saps the computer owner's RAM, storage and CPU. Hint: It is not the companies that provide "free" software. I initially experienced computing on a VAX at a university, before I ever owned a "personal computer". Perhaps it was only the program we were running, but the speed was faster than anything I ever experienced later on a PC. I worked continuously over the years to try to make the PC "user experience" as fast as that VAX "user experience" as possible, for myself only. It has worked quite well. The web that the "tech" companies want, where websites can and do vary drastically in speed and design,^1 and the one I want are two different things. Under the text-only, no Javascript, no CSS, no DNS system^2 I have designed, all websites are more or less the same speed and they all present information in more or less the same format. Like the parent comment, I like the web as a concept. However I dislike the "tech" company model for the web. I am not the only one. IMHO, adoption of the "tech" company model for the web, with its steadily increasing nonsense, relies on a world of computing without meaningful, informed choice and without feasible alternative options. 1. Or, as the author cites, one where the practical result is traffic being routed through Google, e.g., AMP. 2. NB. I am not against the use of such facilties. However, due to the way they are commonly used on today's web, and given the lack of user control over their use, eliminating them was necessary to achieve the speed I wanted.
eternityforest 4y ago
I remember the web being scary more than anything in the 56k days. Viruses were something you constantly thought about on any site you didn't know well. Now we just have data collection, which is I suppose theoretically pretty scary, but not an immediate concern at the moment for most people, or at least not a big enough to change people's behavior. I also remember it being a bit slow. Sometimes a lot slow. And media being obviously near unusable. I'd definitely take almost everything about the modern web over the old web. Except the content, which was way better back then, and endless scrolling, which is ass. I strongly suspect the two may be related.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
something to be said about constraint and enforcing some artificial limitations on yourself as a developer or designer. i think the issue is down to developers, on their iMac Pro with 4k screen, 5 mins from the data centre. a lack of appreciation for the bloat, because it's not really felt. i recently took a habit to stop updating software. i noticed how many updates are totally useless and often causing regressions in my experience.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

I truly wish I had the data to back this up, but in my memory the web is WAY WAY faster than it was back then even with all of the extra "bullshit". I mean the images were like 16 colors and 200X300, and even just text based sites were slower and latency was worse too. Am I crazy here?

121789 4y ago
Yeah I agree. Lots more bloat now, but I'm not often waiting for images to render or sites to load in general
gonehome 4y ago
Yeah - I think people forget, things were really slow back then.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
No doubt the modern web is faster even on moderate xDSL connections. I remember web pages taking half a minute to load, even relatively basic ones. The 56k v90 was quite a bit quicker than 14.4k too. Its not even close to similar I remember watching JPG images gradually progress through their low quality versions upwards. Pages were a lot lighter back then but still much much slower than today.
FredPret 4y ago
I remember images loading one line at a time. Now I can stream 4k video. Not sure what OP is on about. There is lots of bloat but we are now on a jumbo jet and we used to be on a hot-air balloon
- 13of40 4y ago
  Somewhere around 1998 or 1999 I was working as a web developer and I listened to a pitch from a guy who wanted to build a video streaming site. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out who was going to pay a subscription to watch grainy, postage-stamp sized videos in a web browser, but apparently that sort of thing took off.
numpad0 4y ago
My working theory is that slow behaviors are preferred because else people gets startled.
icedchai 4y ago
Latency was also a contributing factor. 56K modem latency is about 200 to 300ms higher than latency on a pure digital connection (ISDN, 56K frame relay, 56K DDS, etc.)

abxytg 4y ago

> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much cooler and better than anything the 90s had.

mysterydip 4y ago
I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Pretty much none. I used Word 97 well into the early 2000's. In the early 90's, my Amiga ran a decent word processor in 1 meg of RAM. Software expands to consume whatever resources are available: memory, disk, CPU, bandwidth...
- pixl97 4y ago
  It may be a different answer than you expect... A lot less developer time spent making sure the application fit in a tiny amount of memory. Of course that sucks for you as a user when an application takes up 4+GB of memory for no reason (I'm looking at you Teams). But for the company that writes it, it is great. Compile and ship, no more weeks or months of trying to shave off every bit so you can fit this in 16MB of RAM, or on just a few floppies. You have a big customer that will sign a 10 million+ contract if you add feature X? Sorry, no way to make that work in under 105KB, which means we can't ship it.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others. It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.

dilyevsky 4y ago

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

lisper 4y ago
Same here. I have very clear memories of dismissing the WWW as useless for exactly this reason. Those memories are 30 years old so they may not be entirely accurate, but the principle of embarrassment [1] lends them some support if you buy into that sort of thing. [1] https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarrassment/ https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarras...
- tomc1985 4y ago
  I don't know about you guys but I got a hell of a lot done on a 56K modem all the way up until the mid-2000s. Hell, I was even doing group content on City of Heroes from the dial-up connection I had while working my night-shift hotel job, and the game played surprisingly well given the bandwidth and latencies I had.
Topgamer7 4y ago
I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image. Generally pages loaded great.
- Isamu 4y ago
  Ha, me too, I turned off images back then and it made everything snappy and very pleasant. I just wanted the text, the information. It’s weird though- people want all the nonsense. More and more that is the primary use of the web.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  you guys should try and dig up some old home movies of using the computer back in the 90s Nowadays if something isn't a bloated pile of trash, it'll literally load up in a few dozen milliseconds or less. Back then, even a pretty lightweight text-only site would take seconds to load and render (and of course, bloated crap sites back then took upwards of a minute to load if you left images on)

leeoniya 4y ago

it would feel a lot faster if you could live with viewing max res 640x480 or 800x600 images on your 4k display

Cyberdogs7 4y ago

Your screen name forced me into a double take, as it's very rare for me to come across a similar name. On topic, the idea of performance optimization seems to be completely lost in large sectors of modern day computer science. My recent experience being windows. I have several old laptops that had been rendered completely unusable through windows updates [one even stopped charging]. However, once replacing windows with Ubuntu, they 'feel' like some of the fastest machines I have. Hell, even the one that wouldn't charge, now charges and works like a charm. It's sad to think of all the waste, physical, electrical, and economical, that stems from poorly optimized code.

wildrhythms 4y ago
When product managers come to me and demand I make the <select> look a certain way to fit in with the rest of the "design language", I end up having to re-write all of the base and edge cases and accessibility and theming of what's already a perfectly functioning UI component. That code gets shipped to every user. And that's just one component... tomorrow I will make the <input type="checkbox"> look a certain way. Probably hundreds of KB just building these base UI components to fit in with some "design goal" that will change again in 6 months. If it makes the app unusable for some (unmeasured) percentage of our users on featurephones in developing countries, they don't care, because the product managers making these decisions will be gone in 6 months too, replaced with another with the same attitudes. At least the app "looks nice"!

powersnail 4y ago

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I don't know, perhaps the internet I had was just too shit, but it was so much slower than what I get now. I remember when the progress bar was actually meaningful when loading a pure text webpage; and I don't get that today unless I'm using a phone inside an elevator.

onion2k 4y ago

But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post. A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definitely much bigger, and arguably bloated with unnecessary junk, but they still download faster than they did in the 14.4kbps days. Bandwidth speed and page sizes don't explain why you think the web was faster decades ago. I think it's more likely that you're just wrong. I remember using the web in 1995 on a 28kbps modem (such speed!), and it was slow as hell. It was genuinely click-a-link-and-get-cup-of-tea slow a lot of the time. Not only wasy connection awful, a lot of hosting companies were slow too. Servers would throttle and kill sites that used too much bandwidth. Pages often failed to load compared to today. I still used it of course because it was amazing, but I didn't enjoy it. Surfing wasn't really possible. Uploading anything was a pipedream. When I went to uni in 1997 and got access to broadband for the first time it was a revelation. The web became truly useful. I had my first website up and running 3 months later and I've never looked back...

Cyberdog 4y ago
Speaking factually, I guess you have to be correct and nostalgia is tainting my memories. Maybe my standards were also much lower then, so a ten-second page load was less offensive then than it is now.
goodpoint 4y ago
A 200-character text post was not 10KB. Tons of useful information was available in pure text. Also, most webpages were loading in far less than 500ms on a newer modems, 56k. More importantly, a lot of pure-text pages were focused on providing dense information that you would read for minutes. The load time was negligible in comparison. Today information density on the web is the opposite.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
yeah but the web on a campus intranet mid 90s was super fast. i think you both have valid points.

Dove 4y ago

I can echo the sentiment. I would love to start over and save only the good stuff. With that said, I am wary of my memory of the web of the 90's because everything was so new. There are games I remember loving and seeing no serious flaws in twenty-five years ago, that I now go back to at original resolutions and original framerates and find completely unplayable. But having no point of comparison, what I was enthralled by at the time wasn't necessarily excellent control or excellent design -- it was being able to move in virtual 3d space at all. My dad tells a similar story about Atari's Pong in the 1970's. Everyone was so excited by being able to control something on the TV screen that nothing else about the experience really mattered by comparison. When the web became popular, the prospect of being able to interact with like-minded people anywhere in the world and from all walks of life and in communities of a size and power and with resources otherwise impossible -- it was all so new. And when I remember the time, I remember that. I didn't care about having to log into web sites on every visit. I didn't care about replicating data across devices. I didn't care about unprofessional web pages. I didn't care that everything was under construction, the design was universally bad, and that things often broke. I didn't care that any interaction had to go back to the server. I didn't care that pages were typically pretty static, and exploring meant constantly finding new ones rather than connecting with an author or community. But if you dropped me back in the 90's now, I would care about all of that stuff. I'm not defending the bloated and the awful. I often install video games now and think "GIGAbytes? What on earth FOR??" I often work on software now and see chains of chains of chains of dependencies and despair that we have clearly lost our way. Web sites crowded with ad-blocker defeating ads make me wish for the days when they would merely blink at you, rather than waiting 15 seconds and then starting up a video with sound in some random corner of the site. I do feel like if someone made me emperor, I could start over and do it right. I do wish we could all collectively agree to just not suck. I'm just very skeptical that going back in time is quite as awesome as memory would lead one to expect.

dizhn 4y ago

I remember the name of one particular jpeg I downloaded. We used to go to the school lab, start the download, put a paper sign on the monitor asking people not to turn it off and come back later for our new jpeg. (It was atol.jpeg)

icedchai 4y ago

The web has gotten much faster. I remember waiting around for at least 5 to 10 seconds for pages to load over 14.4K. Still, modern web sites are incredibly bloated. There was a period in the late 90's where I had an early cable modem connection (3 megabits.) All sites were still built for dialup, so things loaded at lightning speed. In general, I'd say effective speeds have remained constant since the early 2000's since site bloat has kept pace with increasing broadband speeds.

ookblah 4y ago

Yeah...56k felt plenty slow back then. Biggest jump for me that gave me that wow factor was when we went from 56k to a "cable modem".

the_third_wave 4y ago

> a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second Nope, that'd be a 14 Mbit modem, a relatively high speed for ADSL modems and not something you'd be able to push through those rusty barbed wire fences which make up some of those old PSTN installations. I guess you mean the 14.4k modem has a theoretical speed of 14.400 bits per second.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now I remember taking 24 hours to download something like an IDE or the JDK. No way could I do a clean Maven build of one of the projects I work on now with late 90's download speeds.

icedchai 4y ago
In the late 90's, you would've been forced to have a smaller set of dependencies, both out of necessity and because they didn't exist. In the early Java apps I worked on, we downloaded all the dependencies manually, generally from a shared drive or CVS repo, and put them in our classpath.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Yeah exactly, I would typically have a directory with all the dependencies that I downloaded one by one and use that as part of the classpath, whereas now I do mvn clean install --download-the-internet

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Guess who is paying for all that increased nonsense. Hint: It is not the "tech" companies orchestrating its delivery. It is true this problem is not limited to bandwidth. The same applies to RAM, secondary storage and in some cases CPU. Who pays for the increased nonsense that saps the computer owner's RAM, storage and CPU. Hint: It is not the companies that provide "free" software. I initially experienced computing on a VAX at a university, before I ever owned a "personal computer". Perhaps it was only the program we were running, but the speed was faster than anything I ever experienced later on a PC. I worked continuously over the years to try to make the PC "user experience" as fast as that VAX "user experience" as possible, for myself only. It has worked quite well. The web that the "tech" companies want, where websites can and do vary drastically in speed and design,^1 and the one I want are two different things. Under the text-only, no Javascript, no CSS, no DNS system^2 I have designed, all websites are more or less the same speed and they all present information in more or less the same format. Like the parent comment, I like the web as a concept. However I dislike the "tech" company model for the web. I am not the only one. IMHO, adoption of the "tech" company model for the web, with its steadily increasing nonsense, relies on a world of computing without meaningful, informed choice and without feasible alternative options. 1. Or, as the author cites, one where the practical result is traffic being routed through Google, e.g., AMP. 2. NB. I am not against the use of such facilties. However, due to the way they are commonly used on today's web, and given the lack of user control over their use, eliminating them was necessary to achieve the speed I wanted.

eternityforest 4y ago

I remember the web being scary more than anything in the 56k days. Viruses were something you constantly thought about on any site you didn't know well. Now we just have data collection, which is I suppose theoretically pretty scary, but not an immediate concern at the moment for most people, or at least not a big enough to change people's behavior. I also remember it being a bit slow. Sometimes a lot slow. And media being obviously near unusable. I'd definitely take almost everything about the modern web over the old web. Except the content, which was way better back then, and endless scrolling, which is ass. I strongly suspect the two may be related.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

something to be said about constraint and enforcing some artificial limitations on yourself as a developer or designer. i think the issue is down to developers, on their iMac Pro with 4k screen, 5 mins from the data centre. a lack of appreciation for the bloat, because it's not really felt. i recently took a habit to stop updating software. i noticed how many updates are totally useless and often causing regressions in my experience.