this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Once you dialed in, everything was much the same as today. Even the earliest internet PCs still needed a modem, just the modem would need to dial a phone number instead of being always connected like today. Everything took longer to load. Instead of having multiple megabytes down, you'd have a few kilobytes down. A single picture would take 5 seconds or longer. The web was still mostly reading, rather than video like today. Most you'd get back then was a GIF, and it would take ~5 secs to download each frame.
And that was for a very small picture. I can remember watching an image raster in top-to-bottom over 30 seconds to a minute, lol.
Dialup was slow, even 56k.
DSL was a game changer.
I still remember seeing a news report when I was 8 or 9 about a network of hardened military computers that were designed to maintain connectivity / network functionality in case of a natural disaster or war, and what it would mean for business and civilian life.
2 years later, we got our first PC with a 14.4kbps modem. Bulletin boards and emails only.