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The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lu

The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.

MandieD 3y ago
56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
- felipemnoa 3y ago
  >>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!
leereeves 3y ago
> the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.
- InvaderFizz 3y ago
  144kbps(IDSL, actually ISDN), 384kbps, 768kbps, and 1.5mbps were incredibly common speeds during the early days and especially not in major cities. I was on dialup in BFE, switch to 64k ISDN in 97/98, and cable came alone at a whopping 3mbps in 99, complete game changer. Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I grew up in a small town that Europeans would have a hard time calling it a village. We were too far away from a CO to get DSL even with repeaters. No cable provider wanted to bring us service either as there were not enough people to ever recovering the expense of stringing the lines. The best I ever had while living there was 33.6k using a 56k modem
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  Where do you live?! I thought we had it bad with 15Mbps ADSL in rural Vermont. YouTube and Netflix are surprisingly tolerable as long as only one person is watching. How is it for you at 5? Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    At 5 Mbps, YouTube only works up to 720p. I assume streaming is the same but haven't seen one that reports the current resolution. We do have cell service. We're in an older 1950s development that was never rewired, but not far from newer developments. The biggest problem for me is that downloads keep getting bigger and bigger. The latest AAA games are almost 100 GB and take days to download.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      All 3 of the major carriers have unlimited plans that would far outpace your DSL.
      - bradknowles 3y ago
        The GP may well only have 4G/LTE available, not the faster 5G/fixed wireless. In our neighborhood, the 5G/fixed wireless stuff is not yet available from T-Mobile or Verizon, only 4G/LTE. And either way, even that coverage is spotty and speed varies highly on the time of day that you're trying to use it. All this is fine for a tertiary backup solution (behind Starlink) but not as a primary method of accessing the Internet.
    - charrondev 3y ago
      Have you considered Starlink? You should be able to get a ton more bandwidth there.
  - astrange 3y ago
- izacus 3y ago
  The initial rollout in my country was 512kbps/128, which later got slightly bumped to 1024/128. That was the default speed for a long time.
- mrighele 3y ago
  When first ADSL came out in my country, the speed was about 256Kbps; 758Kpbs arrived only a few years later
time0ut 3y ago
I moved into the dorms with two computers: a gaming laptop circa 2001 and a cheap AMD Duron based box running Linux and the counterstrike server software. Good times.

MandieD 3y ago

56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.

felipemnoa 3y ago
>>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!

leereeves 3y ago

> the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.

InvaderFizz 3y ago
144kbps(IDSL, actually ISDN), 384kbps, 768kbps, and 1.5mbps were incredibly common speeds during the early days and especially not in major cities. I was on dialup in BFE, switch to 64k ISDN in 97/98, and cable came alone at a whopping 3mbps in 99, complete game changer. Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I grew up in a small town that Europeans would have a hard time calling it a village. We were too far away from a CO to get DSL even with repeaters. No cable provider wanted to bring us service either as there were not enough people to ever recovering the expense of stringing the lines. The best I ever had while living there was 33.6k using a 56k modem
mauvehaus 3y ago
Where do you live?! I thought we had it bad with 15Mbps ADSL in rural Vermont. YouTube and Netflix are surprisingly tolerable as long as only one person is watching. How is it for you at 5? Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
- leereeves 3y ago
  At 5 Mbps, YouTube only works up to 720p. I assume streaming is the same but haven't seen one that reports the current resolution. We do have cell service. We're in an older 1950s development that was never rewired, but not far from newer developments. The biggest problem for me is that downloads keep getting bigger and bigger. The latest AAA games are almost 100 GB and take days to download.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    All 3 of the major carriers have unlimited plans that would far outpace your DSL.
    - bradknowles 3y ago
      The GP may well only have 4G/LTE available, not the faster 5G/fixed wireless. In our neighborhood, the 5G/fixed wireless stuff is not yet available from T-Mobile or Verizon, only 4G/LTE. And either way, even that coverage is spotty and speed varies highly on the time of day that you're trying to use it. All this is fine for a tertiary backup solution (behind Starlink) but not as a primary method of accessing the Internet.
  - charrondev 3y ago
    Have you considered Starlink? You should be able to get a ton more bandwidth there.
- astrange 3y ago
izacus 3y ago
The initial rollout in my country was 512kbps/128, which later got slightly bumped to 1024/128. That was the default speed for a long time.
mrighele 3y ago
When first ADSL came out in my country, the speed was about 256Kbps; 758Kpbs arrived only a few years later

time0ut 3y ago

I moved into the dorms with two computers: a gaming laptop circa 2001 and a cheap AMD Duron based box running Linux and the counterstrike server software. Good times.