Besides speed, what would actually suck about surfing the internet back in the day compared to now?
Besides speed, what would actually suck about surfing the internet back in the day compared to now?
My pick would be, dealing with the 'wild west' atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
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Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you'd have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.
When I used to pirate music back in the late '90s/early '00s with dial-up, I'd setup like 3-4 songs to download and then leave them running overnight with our 28.8Kbps dial-up internet. If anyone called in on the phone during that time, it'd kick the computer off the internet and I'd have to start the downloads over again. Browsing porn (or just images in general) was interesting too as you would literally see images load top down, line by line. Video was essentially out of the question back then and the best we got was like 2 second looping gifs.
Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.
Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.
Damn I'm getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn't online. The internet had it's trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.
Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It's crazy to know they're still in existence and still pretty active.
lol... "old internet" "2008" ... wut?
Browser downloads still have this issue, at least partially. If it fails itself it's fucked, but if you pause it manually it's fine.
Only really applicable in large (200MB+) files and bad internet, but definitely a thing that can still happen and make you start the download from scratch
True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn't possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of...... aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90's but it's still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.
You unlocked some core memories I buried years ago