This is very similar to a project I'm working on called Sim95 [1]. It has an entire networking stack and visual basic style language. You can host your own websites, chat servers, anything you want, and everything runs over a virtual network (websocket that passes through a relay).
It has all the warts of the early internet era: you can program a virus, get people to download it, delete their documents, etc., but it also has a lot of the charm, build a website, chat with strangers, enjoy the lack of facebook (for now until someone builds it).
Lovely. 16MB of RAM in the 90s? That's luxury.
And that dial-up sound always takes me back to happier times. Not unlike normal people's childhood songs.
I had the first iPhone and distinctly remember telling people "I have the entire internet in my pocket at all times" and people finding it strange. I said "I never really have to log off Facebook or Digg" and my friends didn't understand what I meant.
I was so excited to get road runner, which was an isp from I think time warner, rolling out cable modem service in the early 2000s. I ended up taking a day of vacation just to ensure I was going to be home for the installation window.
I don’t remember if my computer at the time had built-in Ethernet or if I had to buy a card.
I have been always-online ever since. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
There's 'offline by default at home' and 'offline by default overall'. And it can blur.
At least as far as 'offline by default at home'
After (1) my dad retired and bought a brand new fancy PC with some of his unused leave time [0] we wound up getting a dial-up account [1] but sometime around 1998/1999 [2] we wound up just getting a secondary phone line; somehow the 'internet' was so magical to all of us kids or young adults, that it was better for our parent's budget to just pay for the extra phone line.
Still, it wasn't even 56K. Phone lines in my area of Detroit were garbage, if it did connect at 56K it was unstable as hell, 28.8 was the 'reliable' connection rate, to the point you prayed that was what it connected at.
For 'offline overall' the change can be more blurry, at least in my head. I blame work phones, my PSP's WiFi capabilities, and the HTC Dream (released 2008) as the slow shift for me.
FWIW, I did enjoy my time on WinPho, where the siloing of the OS and lack of apps, led to a quieter time where my phone was a 'phone' (and honestly, still a better one at calls, SMS, or driving navigation than than my current one) rather than be tempted by anything online.
It's weird to think about. Before I went to college, Online (thanks to that dial-up) was an escape from the prison of my home and where I lived. But now Online feels more like a tug away from enjoying life.
[0] - P2 266 MHZ 32MB Ram, 2(? might have been 4) GB HDD...
[1] - Thanks Diablo for the WorldNet trial and thanks WorldNet for having the practically unlimited usage thing [4]
[2] - My oldest Sister was Driving home from College and the engine on the car blew up while I was online. She couldn't call for help. [3]
[3] - How's that for a technology shift though, as far as taking things for granted (i.e. call waiting being seamless and not costing extra per month.)
[4] - Except for the bit where when AT&T somehow figured out we were using a 'Share-dial-up-over-LAN' a few years later, had to switch to Mindspring after dad had me do the research.
56k dial-up was a special upgrade from US Robotics and only some providers/numbers would have that speed. Yeah, as you said, more likely you will end up with 28.8 (based on the live negotiation during the connection setup I think)
A while back, I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to roughly max dialup speeds https://dialup.moveything.com/. It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that are fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.
It uses rate limit buckets per-IP on the server side, applied before SSL termination so it doesn't include that overhead. If you open two tabs, they'll have to share. If your behind a NAT, you'll have to share with your NAT-mates. And, it also has headers saying not to cache anything, so you can continue to enjoy the experience.
Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.
And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.
This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.
56k modems didn’t always negotiate to the full 56k. The handshaking allowed connections at much slower speeds. It depended on the quality of the line. This is the US - we didn’t have ISDN, at least no one I knew had it in 1996.
ISDN was available near me in 1996 (Southern California, Pacific Bell) ... but nobody I knew had it. It cost a lot for the install and monthly, and there was no unlimited local calls tariff like there was for a regular "analog" lane. You'd have to be pretty serious to want that.
In order to get 56k, you needed to be on a reasonable quality line, and there needed to be an all digital (PRI) connection between the Telco end of your phone line and your ISP.
If your line was noisy good luck. If your line had loading coils in the path between the CO and you, that would help your voice calls but make 56k harder to achieve (and was definitely problematic for DSL). Most telephone lines had loading coils every wire mile between the CO and the customer. If you had any of the older wonky stuff telcos used to magic more pairs for customers out of thin air, chances are they wouldn't work at 56k.
I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".
FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.
Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...
Who is upvoting this AI-generated nonsense? This is embarrassingly badly made. We have a solitaire game where you cannot drag the cards (and HTML elements move around every time you click), a pinball game with no gap between the flippers, etc etc etc... Nothing about this suggests a human made it.
A lot of people don’t know how cool it felt to dial into the internet or a service like Compuserve or Prodigy and suddenly have this whole world open up to you. Even at 56k.
I fondly remember the text of pages loading almost instantly over dialup, and then over time images popped in. If you were lucky the author included image sizes, so elements didn't resize and move around.
A modern website has so many round-trip things happening for ads, tracking, and whatever goes on behind the scenes for frameworks and services are used. A lot of this is multiple round trips and blocking so you have to wait to start reading, and if something times out the website fails to load.
Between about 2012 and 2020 I had a mobile phone plan that throttled to 100kbps when I ran out of data (which was often). Throughout that time google search and hackernews worked at that speed normally, but in that time period the percentage of websites that fail to ever load changed from about 25% to virtually 100%.
I'm sure someone pointed this out in the other thread, but 56kpbs modems essentially didn't exist in 1996. They launched at the end of the year, cost a ton, and the manufacturers hadn't standardized the speeds, so it really didn't matter much as you weren't browsing AOL, MSN or Compuserve with it yet.
33.6k.rip is a harder domain name to get though, so I get it.
> the manufacturers hadn't standardized the speeds
Yeah, but there was pretty much two options x2 (usr) and kflex (everyone else). I dunno about AOL and those guys, but for ISPs (and BBSes), they'd list the speeds with their dial-up numbers, so if you had an x2 modem you'd try their x2 number, and if you had a kflex modem, you'd try their kflex number... If you liked your ISP, when they got 56k, you would buy a modem for the tech they picked... if you were choosing a new ISP, you'd pick one that supported the tech you had.
Switching ISPs was pretty easy back then, unless you were using ISP email, but local ISPs might set you up with email forwarding as you're leaving. So switching to get a better connection speed was a real thing. You might also switch because your ISP had too many busy signals, or because even though you connected at 56k, their upstream connection was overloaded or had poor routing and you had poor speeds to the rest of the world.
That reminds me. Can we standardize cypress tests to load the website via a restricted speed as one of the tests? Some of of our modern webpages are still slow on the latest iPhone/Pixel/Samsung over 5G.
8,600,743 bytes of assets and frameworks later I'm finally able to see your contact-us address.
It has all the warts of the early internet era: you can program a virus, get people to download it, delete their documents, etc., but it also has a lot of the charm, build a website, chat with strangers, enjoy the lack of facebook (for now until someone builds it).
1: https://sim95.kippy.io/
Also riddled with inaccuracies.
(When did this change? Around 2012?)
I don’t remember if my computer at the time had built-in Ethernet or if I had to buy a card.
I have been always-online ever since. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
But I do still miss the BBS scene.
A few bad moves and it’s been quite a subjective fall.
There's 'offline by default at home' and 'offline by default overall'. And it can blur.
At least as far as 'offline by default at home'
After (1) my dad retired and bought a brand new fancy PC with some of his unused leave time [0] we wound up getting a dial-up account [1] but sometime around 1998/1999 [2] we wound up just getting a secondary phone line; somehow the 'internet' was so magical to all of us kids or young adults, that it was better for our parent's budget to just pay for the extra phone line.
Still, it wasn't even 56K. Phone lines in my area of Detroit were garbage, if it did connect at 56K it was unstable as hell, 28.8 was the 'reliable' connection rate, to the point you prayed that was what it connected at.
For 'offline overall' the change can be more blurry, at least in my head. I blame work phones, my PSP's WiFi capabilities, and the HTC Dream (released 2008) as the slow shift for me.
FWIW, I did enjoy my time on WinPho, where the siloing of the OS and lack of apps, led to a quieter time where my phone was a 'phone' (and honestly, still a better one at calls, SMS, or driving navigation than than my current one) rather than be tempted by anything online.
It's weird to think about. Before I went to college, Online (thanks to that dial-up) was an escape from the prison of my home and where I lived. But now Online feels more like a tug away from enjoying life.
[0] - P2 266 MHZ 32MB Ram, 2(? might have been 4) GB HDD...
[1] - Thanks Diablo for the WorldNet trial and thanks WorldNet for having the practically unlimited usage thing [4]
[2] - My oldest Sister was Driving home from College and the engine on the car blew up while I was online. She couldn't call for help. [3]
[3] - How's that for a technology shift though, as far as taking things for granted (i.e. call waiting being seamless and not costing extra per month.)
[4] - Except for the bit where when AT&T somehow figured out we were using a 'Share-dial-up-over-LAN' a few years later, had to switch to Mindspring after dad had me do the research.
It uses rate limit buckets per-IP on the server side, applied before SSL termination so it doesn't include that overhead. If you open two tabs, they'll have to share. If your behind a NAT, you'll have to share with your NAT-mates. And, it also has headers saying not to cache anything, so you can continue to enjoy the experience.
iirc ISDN did require a special phone line, but 56k was fine over regular lines.
Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.
And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.
This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.
If your line was noisy good luck. If your line had loading coils in the path between the CO and you, that would help your voice calls but make 56k harder to achieve (and was definitely problematic for DSL). Most telephone lines had loading coils every wire mile between the CO and the customer. If you had any of the older wonky stuff telcos used to magic more pairs for customers out of thin air, chances are they wouldn't work at 56k.
I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".
FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.
Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...
Nowadays, good luck getting a dial tone. Afaik, no telco actually cares about phones these days.
You only got max speeds where the noise was low enough.
sometimes you'd also reconnect because the handshake got messed up and you'd connect at 33.6 instead of 'real' 56k
A modern website has so many round-trip things happening for ads, tracking, and whatever goes on behind the scenes for frameworks and services are used. A lot of this is multiple round trips and blocking so you have to wait to start reading, and if something times out the website fails to load.
Between about 2012 and 2020 I had a mobile phone plan that throttled to 100kbps when I ran out of data (which was often). Throughout that time google search and hackernews worked at that speed normally, but in that time period the percentage of websites that fail to ever load changed from about 25% to virtually 100%.
Some were asking: a/s/l hahahaha
33.6k.rip is a harder domain name to get though, so I get it.
Yeah, but there was pretty much two options x2 (usr) and kflex (everyone else). I dunno about AOL and those guys, but for ISPs (and BBSes), they'd list the speeds with their dial-up numbers, so if you had an x2 modem you'd try their x2 number, and if you had a kflex modem, you'd try their kflex number... If you liked your ISP, when they got 56k, you would buy a modem for the tech they picked... if you were choosing a new ISP, you'd pick one that supported the tech you had.
Switching ISPs was pretty easy back then, unless you were using ISP email, but local ISPs might set you up with email forwarding as you're leaving. So switching to get a better connection speed was a real thing. You might also switch because your ISP had too many busy signals, or because even though you connected at 56k, their upstream connection was overloaded or had poor routing and you had poor speeds to the rest of the world.
Now we just need to bring back BBS’s and the daily turn based games. Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, etc.
Select modem mode and just hurt.
8,600,743 bytes of assets and frameworks later I'm finally able to see your contact-us address.