The Sound Of Dial-Up Internet

[george]

Fond memories of the good old times with dial up modems...

[sbk]

good old days of waiting ten minutes for a page to load. On the plus side, it did give me time to refill my coffee!

[Banzai99]

Haha, great memories, when if you 48Kbps connection you counted yourself lucky.

[Thaddeus]

Marvellous.

[thaimite]

It reminds me of the days in HK when I would get in to work and find that head office had sent a 1MB file to my Compuserve account and I knew that my entire morning would be spent trying to download it.

[doctormann]

Ah, I remember it well.

Coincidentally, this very day, I received an email from csloxinfo telling me that my dial-up internet account with them has expired. I haven't used the account since I went broadband about three years ago - it's just been sitting there with 72 unused hours on it. Apparently I can revitalize the account provided that I buy a top-up card and register it within the next month but I don't think that I'll be bothering to do this somehow. The associated email account has been redundant for years as well.

I will say this for csloxinfo though - the dial-up service may have been slow but at least it was available 24/7 with very rare outages, which is more than can be said for ToT, although they are getting better.

DM

[handydog]

Only rid of dialup 12 months.... It was normal to take a week to torrent a 700meg file

The sound still gives me nightmares

[RKASA]

good old days of waiting ten minutes for a page to load. On the plus side, it did give me time to refill my coffee!

Good old days? You don't live around here where it still is that way. We may have 200k dail up now - but web sites are being built for 6mb ADSL or optic connections. I am looking forward to 3g in 2018 - maybe - well maybe not.

[Chicog]

You should have seen it over international connections in the Middle East, when you counted in bps not kbps!

[ThaidDown]

Have an old machine with a dial up modem built in.

This post reminded me that years ago used a free TOT dial up service, so connected to the house phone hit the dialup icon and it connected first time no problem..... at 50.6Kbps., not bad for a 56K dial up modem, in fact at one time that was considered a good speed.

Going back even further the first modem I ever used was an 'acoustic coupler' - 300 bps. I think that was steam powered though.

The not so good old days.

[ThaiRich]

Haha, great memories, when if you 48Kbps connection you counted yourself lucky.

I got you beat. I remember the standard was a 14.4 kbps connection and top of the line home PC's at a 100 mb hard drive. Now everyone knows how old I am. HAHA.

[astral]

Great memories of the sound of the handshake to establish the connection speed.

[Guest]

Haha, great memories, when if you 48Kbps connection you counted yourself lucky.

I got you beat. I remember the standard was a 14.4 kbps connection and top of the line home PC's at a 100 mb hard drive. Now everyone knows how old I am. HAHA.

I must be from stone ages. I had 2400 baud modem with old type of terminal, connected to the Univ modem pool. At the time it was simply amazing to be able to talk to someone who was sitting on another continent via IRC.

There was no www, not even Gopher.. but Usenet news was quite popular.

[Chicog]

Aye, when I were a lad and we use to chat up t'girls on the Univac Console......

[rakman]

Haha, great memories, when if you 48Kbps connection you counted yourself lucky.

That's the sound of a 53K modem. By tariff, the max was 48k..

[wpcoe]

I was a "road warrier" in the old days of 300/1200/2400-baud dial-up. In hotels/motels without RJ-11 jacks, i.e. hardwired phones, I would slice open the phone wire sheath and separate the individual wires and stick a safety pin through the red an black wires (I think it was?) I carried a cable with an RJ-11 connector on one end, and two alligator clips on the other end. The alligator clips were placed on the safety pins. It was standard procedure to run your hand over the telephone wire behind the desk/bed to see if someone had already sliced open the wire before you made your own slit. Ah, yes. The good old days.

[GreenSnapper]

The sound has gone, the speed has stayed. At least on True ADSL....

[sysardman]

It's like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch reading all these posts, for everyones reckoning it wasn't actually all that long ago. I remember all this stuff - one poster mentioned 100Mb HDs - that was luxury, I remember 5Mb HDs and storing stuff on hundreds of floppies.

[bendejo]

Ah yes, back when the telephone systems were tin cans connected by string we would need to buy things that allowed the cans to hook up to the ababcus. Damned those adapters were expensive. They didn't work either.

[barryw52]

TTY's 300Baud Modems, acoustic couplers we worked slowly in those days. Step by step telephone exchanges.

ThaiRich the first IBM PC had 10Mb hard drives I think 100Mb was a big harddrive.

Now we complain about slow 10Mbps internet links!!!