This, boys and girls, was what the internet used to look like, when you were waiting for a page to load over a 1200-baud modem.
Hit enter. Go for a drink. Hit enter. Go take a bathroom break.
Yes we've come a very long way now, and High Speed is mostly that. That’s why we could never envision the day when we'd buy software over the internet, or even, madness, watch video over the online connection.
But high speed internet connections are here now, and that means you'll get no more pictures like this of me, back in the day.
...I kinda miss the first days of the public internet. They were heady times.
You were a pioneer - I was a late-comer, since my first modem was 33.6K rated. Then came the heady day when I could afford a 56K job.
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I too miss that early internet, when I hand-coded pages using notepad to make them as small as possible, using every trick I could find to reduce the file size so that they would load faster. A 10K page was OK, but a 100K page took forever, and embedded images would allow bathroom visits as you say. Video streaming did happen, but it was like watching a low res form of minecraft.
Around 2002 or perhaps a little later someone in house opposite where I worked had installed a 500K connection and an open wireless access point. Suddenly it was possible to download an entire Linux install CD in about 45min instead of the 8+ hours or so it took at home. Then Broadband arrived in the village, peaking at 2.5Mbps, and around 18 months ago fibre.
I miss the days of the internet as wild frontier, when only the technically skilled and intellectually motivated could actually use it. Crude, sure, but fun.
I think having to work as hard as we did to share and do certain things made it feel a bit more exclusive. Now it's easy to share. Point, click, Tweet! It doesn't seem as meaningful, almost like an automatic afterthought. I think that's why I've re-embraced blogging lately. But, oh, the early days! I can still see the red lights of my 14.4 modem blinking away as pages slowly appeared in Netscape Navigator. Before that - all text, yet it was still exciting just to be able to connect with so many people in so many places!
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