Hardware Does anyone miss Dialup and old computers?

[Yepi69]

ITT people who miss Windows 95/98 etc etc don't realize you can just virtualbox.

Just so you know, you aren't teaching me anything at all, I often use Windows 95/98/ME on VMware, mostly to get rid of the nostalgia feeling or to just wreck Windows, or make experiences.

 

[XDel]

Oh. Yeahhh. I SURE miss waiting minutes upon minutes for a single webpage to load.

I remember the first time my parents set up our new modem and dell. We turned it on, and opened AOL. Holy crap. I was forever scarred by the dial tone.

Beautiful industrial noiz!

 

[Rogue_Syst3m]

hell no, speeds, ANNOYING sound, please for the love of god no.....

 

[pokefloote]

I remember the days of Netzero... They had this thing where you can get free internet, but for only 10 hours a month. (I was a young teen, with no money. Parents didn't care for internet at the time.)

Hiding 'dat sound so my parents wouldn't find out was a problem.

 

[TheMasterSSA]

I can't conceive how one would miss anything related to a dial-up connection, it's just plain absurd.

 

[finkmac]

To connect older computers to the internet, you often need dialup... My DSL plan includes Dialup.

 

[drgnslayers]

I do remember that time mainly because the Internet was already slow but when other people was browsing the Net at the same time, it was becoming even slower, especially at school. You felt the urge to disconnect the Eternet cable from all the other computers so that you could have all the available bandwidth for browsing and searching on the Net. Otherwise, besides the Win98 and dialup sounds, I don't miss anything except playing games that need DOS.

 

[Sicklyboy]

We got a second landline into the house so we could have a dedicated one for the computer (which is now our fax number, which we don't use) and still be able to talk. We were one of the most pro houses on the block.

I remember back when I was asking MY PARENTS for computer and technological advice. It's quite the other way around, now.

 

[Tuddles]

lol i remember my old EGA 386 pc with like 8mb hdd lol ahhh thoes are the days, hooking the phone up to call the web to go to an all text site to dl a pron pic to you pc that took 20-30 minutes to load line by line and was in like 4 colours how sweet it was, then and only then if you were lucky you could tap out that pic in black n white on the ol dot matrix printer and sneek it off to school. lol best thing was irc was around then and still is lol that never changed much at all.

 

[J-Machine]

I'll admit the instant gratification of current internet speeds doesn't feel as rewarding to me as say waiting 20 minutes to watch a flash animation on newgrounds or watching a picture show up piece by piece and the anticipation of getting the whole image after... Not to mention the shrill announcement to the world that nobody could use the phone because my search for game faqs and aol chat was more important. the sheer anxiety of that blaring siren telling the world late at night that I was no doubt up to no good... Life was so freaking sweet then.

I also have fond memories of making some Microsoft basic games in grade 4 and having my friends excited to play them and the race to beat the yeti in ski free, finish chips challenge first, and not have a hobo shank you in cross country canada. I kinda remember a mouse getting cheese game on 3.10 but the name escapes me.

 

[Guerillaz]

I'm a 90's kid from the country. I didn't get DSL until 2005 and I still have it! Dial-up was fun as a kid to try to play runescape but even I can remember it sucking.

 

[Hanafuda]

I'm an old dude - was there for it all. The first time I experienced an "internet connection" was in 1981 ... I was in the "gifted" program at my school which gave me access to a Tandy TRS-80 computer, using cassette tape drive. The teacher, who we only saw once a week, came in one time with a modem. We loaded a program, stuck the old rotary phone into the modem, and connected to the gifted program students at another school in the same county. We all knew each other, so after typing basic greetings we spent 45 minutes dissing each other's school, and I sent them a simple game I'd written using Tandy Basic (It was a copy of Atari Battle Tank). I didn't have an "internet" experience again for eleven years, when I bought a laptop with a 60MB hard drive and a 486DX 33mhz processor for law school. I think I paid $20 a month for a 14.4 connection. When 28.8 came to town it was like a revolution.

Dialup sucked.

This is what that modem looked like in 1981 when I was in 8th grade. Not exactly the same model of course - I can't remember that well - but it was this type.

 

[Rizsparky]

I don't miss dialup, but sometimes I miss DOS.

Yup, I'm replaying all the games i loved through DOSBOX, works pretty well.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Hope you all didnt want to sleep tonight

 

[Zetta_x]

I went to staples to print a banner today. I had to upload my design on one of their workstation computers that costed .25 cents per minute. The 2mb file took almost 8 minutes to upload and then another 5 minutes to check out. I burnt through 4 dollars just to upload and checkout... I don't miss it at all

 

[Rizsparky]

This may be a stupid question, but was AOL available to anyone outside the US?

Yup, we had the trial CD's here in England too

 

[raulpica]

I jsut got one of these:

Old school laptop, brah. Will triple-boot MS-DOS, Win3.1 and Win95 for maximum retrogaming awesomeness.

As for 56k... do I miss it? Well, not in itself... But do I miss the half-days spent in Ultima Online mining stuff on a 56k? HECK YEAH.

Do I miss waiting 10 minutes for a SNES game, hoping that it was GOOD otherwise I had wasted $$$ on a dial-up connection for nothing? Yep, I do.

Do I miss the THRILL of finally downloading mslug.zip (after something like 2 hours, hoping that the connection wouldn't DROP) in its entirety and bask in the first MAME wave of emulation goodness? Oh gawd. Yes.

And googling for hours for dodgy GBA sites, searching for games and fan translations of Pokémon Ruby... Man, THOSE were the days.

(yes, I was a dirty AHRRRR.)

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Dat laptop

 

[jumpman1229]

Haha oh man, I remember laptops like that. That left and right click was HORRIBLE!

 

[BORTZ]

I dont miss the speeds but i miss the noises.