The Unexpectedly Cherished Aspects of Old-School Dial-Up Connections We’ve Let Go

Key Takeaways

• Dial-up internet might have been slow, but there were a lot of things we miss (and don’t miss) about those days.
• Something as simple as remaining connected was a challenge for some people in the early days.
• Slow connections tested your patience and your ability to remain engaged while gaming.
• We miss the old days, but we really don’t want them back.

Everyone knows “the old guy” who can’t stop talking about the old days of the Internet when things were simpler. In some of my friend groups, I’m the old guy. I remember when internet speeds were crawling and when we had to sacrifice a demon to get access to the World Wide Web. Yet, there are some things I miss about the days of dial-up internet. If you’re as old as I am, and you were there when the “magic” happened, you’d recognize some of these nostalgic memories.

The Distinctive Sound Of The Dial-Up Modem Connecting To The Internet

When I say “sacrifice a demon,” you shouldn’t take it literally, but that’s how it sounded when connecting to the internet in the olden days. The dial-up process had a few sound cues you could use to figure out where in the process you were (if your modem had a speaker, anyway). Here’s how it went:

• You’d get a dial tone and dial to your ISP. Each ISP had its own number, and you could hear the modem dialing.
• There would be a short cyclical noise—the aforementioned demon!
• There would be a short run of “static” as data flowed back and forth between you and the ISP access point.
• You’d get connected (or disconnected if the password wasn’t valid).

Any millennial who lived during the dial-up years will tell you how distinctive that sound is, and it’s something we’ll never forget as long as we live

Googling Things and Figuring Out How They Were Done

Jason Montoya / How-To Geek

One of the things I find most useful in this day and age is how quickly we can get a video of whatever we want to do and follow along with it. It wasn’t always that easy, however. When dial-up was the connection speed, a video that could give you detailed information was just not easily available.

Sure, we had sites like YouTube, but back then, it didn’t have such a widespread appeal. Plus, we had no phones to handily carry around. We’d have to load the video on a desktop and refer back to it when we needed it, which was very inconvenient. Granted, some people were already using broadband connections at that point, so a YouTube video didn’t take nearly as long to load. In my case, I was still on dial-up, so YouTube videos were a non-starter for me. I certainly didn’t want to spend half an hour waiting for a five-minute video to load.

Google wasn’t yet as popular a search engine, but it got you the best results when you used it. Anything you wanted to know was at your fingertips. I remember moving my old Windows XP PC over to RedHat and having to figure out how to get the modem working since Linux didn’t have the same level of support back then. Thanks to Google and a message board, I got a fully written driver that worked about 80% of the time. The driver was also tiny (a couple of kilobytes), which meant I could transfer it over my slow dial-up connection.

Forums And IM Were Social Media

Today, websites like Instagram and Facebook are how people who share an interest meet each other online. In the days of dial-up internet, however, sites like these were way too content-rich to load onto our browsers. Images and videos took longer to load because of the bottleneck of the dial-up speed. A “good” connection meant you could get as much as 10-12 kb/s download speed. Most of the infrastructure wasn’t designed to run the internet, though, so you’d end up actually getting 2-6kbps download speeds.

So, with such slow download speeds and no chance of streaming video or using social media, how could we interact with others? Text was still a thing we used extensively, and we’d use Instant Messenger (IM) clients like MSN and ICQ to connect to friends (and sometimes strangers) to chat for hours on end. Some long-lasting friendships were forged in the fire of dial-up internet connections.

For those of us who were into specialized hobbies, like anime (which was fringe) and gaming (also fringe), forums were the places we could go to talk about hobbies with like-minded people. These forums had moderators who were real people (not bots), and if you misbehaved, they’d ban your IP, which kept you off the site permanently (in theory). Some popular forum threads had thousands of replies, and if you ever managed to make one of them, you never forgot it.

Patience is a Virtue

When your connection speed was slow, and you could only run one browser window at a time without it freezing (tabs weren’t yet a thing in browsers), you had to have patience. Websites tried their best to reduce image quality so they would load faster, but even so, some websites would take minutes to load. The more elements the website had, the slower it would load. This was one of the reasons Google took over as the leading search engine.

All the other search engines, like Yahoo, Altavista, or AskJeeves, had a ton of other stuff on their home pages to load. If you look at the Yahoo site today, it’s somewhat similar to the original website back in the dial-up days. Google was just a single search bar and nothing else, meaning that it loaded at blazing speed. I even used it as a way of checking if my internet was stable. If Google didn’t load, the connection was either unstable or disconnected.

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No Calls, Please

Dial-up used phone lines, but the catch was that back then, no one had a mobile phone, so all communication was done through phone lines. If you had to download a huge file, you wanted to remain connected for as long as possible, so the file transfer could be completed. That was almost certain to fail in a family that had a single working phone line.

Some families who could afford it took out a second line, but most people relied on the primary line for their connections. When Grandma or an aunt called with updates, the ring would boot you offline, and you’d have to wait until the discussion was done before you started trying to reconnect. So, what happens to those downloads if you get disconnected? Well, you lost all the progress on them, but that spawned a revolution in downloading designed for the dial-up age.

The Rise of the Download Manager

Download managers were a class of software that split up your downloads into multiple “threads” and allowed the resuming of broken downloads. For the dial-up age, it was a godsend because disconnections didn’t waste your download time. There was a catch, though. Some of these download managers came bundled with search bars or malware that would set up shop on your computer and slow it down. Knowing which download manager you could trust was an exercise in awareness.

Multiplayer Gaming With Dial-Up Ping Spikes

Santi S / Shutterstock.com

I mentioned gaming before, but multiplayer gaming was a pretty new experience for those of us with dial-up. There weren’t massively multiplayer games, but you could challenge up to eight friends to play over the internet in some cases. If your connection was solid, you wouldn’t feel like it was so different from playing the real game. However, if your connection was terrible, you’d know.

“Lag spikes” happen when the information your computer sends to the server or your friend’s computer is delayed. This leads to weird behaviors, such as people disappearing and reappearing on maps or seemingly standing still and doing nothing for some time. Most of us chose to play multiplayer late into the night because it was less likely that someone would call on the phone and boot us offline in the middle of a game.

The World Is Hugely Different Now

Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Hadrian / Shutterstock

Some of these things might seem annoying to people who haven’t lived it, but they’re things I miss about dial-up internet. Granted, a lot of this is just nostalgia. I would be the first person to admit that I prefer the high-speed internet of today to yesteryear’s dial-up. Still, there’s a special place in my heart for the many nights I spent playing Starcraft with buddies at 1AM on a Saturday through my faithful dial-up modem. It’s different when you do it by choice today instead of doing it because you don’t want grandma booting you offline because she calls your mom on the home phone.

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