I now have internet...which means you can hear more from me. You wanted that right? Well for better or worse you have me. Internet is a funny thing though. Most of us spent the better part of our lives sans, and now we act like we can't live without it. We spent three months without internet and last week we looked like a couple of zombies, staring mindlessly at computer screens. Yeah it was sad.
Internet has evolved at an alarming rate. I can still remember the sound of the dial-up booting up. If you were fortunate to have skipped the whole dial up thing count yourself so very lucky. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, you were prone to get kicked off at any random moment, and if there were too many people online then you couldn't get back on. Oh and to top it all off, if you weren't one of those people who could afford an extra line. You couldn't use your home phone if you were on the internet likewise internet to phone. This was back a couple of decades ago (wow I feel old) when not everyone and their grandmother had a cellphone either. So you where screwed.
I remember my first boyfriend and I would call each other, and one night when I called his mom answered the phone, and told me in a very polite, but very firm tone that his dad was using the computer for work, and my fellow could not talk. She even punctuated it by pointing out how the phone conversation was choppy because he was trying to get on. As if our very conversation had stopped the world from moving.
Video clips sucked so bad on dial-up. I can remember spending an hour trying to watch a single video clip on the Titanic website (don't judge, it was a different time back then), because there just wasn't a way back then to make the video anything but poor quality.
Here's a...fun...game to play, and it will help you experience what it was like to live in the dark time of 1998. For this game you will need a shitty quality youtube video (think a retro commercial, or something someone recorded with their cellphone) and game dice (six sided, nothing fancy). First thing you do is open the poor quality video, and if you can set it to the lowest quality possible. Then roll the dice twice. The first roll is the number of seconds the video will play before you pause it. The second number is the number of minutes you will wait between pauses, before you can resume your download. For extra...fun?...if you are watching the video between 9:00 in the morning till about 8:00 at night, double the wait time, if it's a weekend triple it. If you can get through the whole video, then congratulations you just experienced dial-up. That was the reason they didn't stream movies and t.v. back then cause My Little Pony would have turned into Gone with the Wind.
So yeah dial-up sucked!
