Post #1089206

2024-11-26 04:34 UTC

@ipg oh, i've had bad fucking Internet before. it's story time. my parents know fuck all about technology and Internet stuff, but they somehow got a DSL at&t modem installed sometime in the early 2000's... and stuck with it until fucking 2020 when it finally broke. my Internet was the absolute worst ever. average download speeds were around 70 kilobytes per second. i basically couldn't do anything. imagine basically anything you do online, it usually just didn't work. stuff as simple as loading images usually took several minutes. i could watch youtube, but only at 144p. i tried to play games online, but i'd always get disconnected very quickly. not only that, but every few minutes it would completely crap out and i'd need to unplug it, plug it back in, and wait around two minutes for it to be back up and working. every. few. minutes. this would interrupt all my active downloads, so even downloading a file that was a few megabytes would usually require several tries. in 2020 the modem finally died and my parents got a new DSL router/modem with a speed of around 10 megabytes/second. after over ten years of having to deal with internet that was comparable to 90's dial up, it was absolutely incredible. i could finally do things like watch youtube at an actual resolution, browse the internet, play games online, etc. 10 megabytes per second isn't the best, but it was just incredible to me. a year or two ago we switched again to 5G which has been pretty good, i think speeds are around 30 megabytes per second so fairly fast. i would *never* want to go back to what i had to deal with back then.

Replies (2)

@mjdxp@labyrinth.zone 2024-11-26 04:41

@ipg you know what having my old internet was like? like making web requests via carrier pidgeon. like using cables made out of molasses. like taping a URL to a snail and releasing it into the wild and hoping it just so happens to find itself in the vicinity of a DNS server. like using free mcdonald's wifi, after the hamburglar came in and stole all of their copper cabling. like shooting bits into space so they'll maybe eventually be picked up by an alien race billions of years later. like a baud rate so low it's a number scientists haven't discovered yet. like throwing a message in a bottle and hoping it gets where it's supposed to be, but that bottle is made out of the most fragile glass known to man so when you throw the bottle into the ocean, the paper inside just sinks to the bottom of the ocean, hopefully to be found by some diving team who will hopefully make out the faded letters saying i want to go to reddit dot com

Open ##1089207
@resuna@ohai.social 2025-05-01 01:10

@mjdxp @ipg > Internet was the absolute worst ever. average download speeds were around 70 kilobytes per second "Worst ever." My first modem was 300 baud. My first public Internet access was 14.4k and upgrading to a 33k Telebit Trailblazer with IP acceleration was life-changing.

Open ##1836548