this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
170 points (96.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43747 readers
2316 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dan@upvote.au 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've been using the internet since 1999, when I got online using a prepaid card ($20 for 20 hours) with a local ISP in Australia and a 33.6Kbps modem (my phone line couldn't handle 56Kbps for some reason). There's a bunch of things I miss.

A major one is that web apps and pages were a LOT faster, even though the connections themselves were slower. Computers have gotten much faster now, yet web apps are so much slower and way more unresponsive than they used to be. It's crazy.

I also miss people all having individual web pages and blogs. It felt more personal. RSS was practically the only way to keep up with a large number of blogs, so a lot of people used it.

On the other hand, these days I can download in 10 seconds what it took me weeks to download back on dial-up. I can download practically anything I'd ever need in a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don't miss the old speeds.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

my phone line couldn’t handle 56Kbps for some reason

Good old pair gain!