#dial up internet

[v0id-c0rroded]

Eurostar webpage, 1997

[writeouswriter]

.....what do you mean "dial up the internet?" did you have to call someone to turn it on for you?

I... I honestly can't tell if this is a joke or not. 😭

But I'll take it as serious because apparently everyone else prior to 2015 was having fun on their nice and fast internet here except me, which is fair! So congrats on being one of today's lucky 10000.jpeg.

It does technically involve the telephone, but not exactly in that way. I'm not calling anyone, but the internet itself is, sort of?

Wikipedia describes dial-up Internet as "a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network to establish a connection to an Internet service provider by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line."

Basically dial up is a now outdated form of internet that used a standard phone line and analog modem to access the Internet at data transfer rates of up to 56 Kbps. It was released commercially around 1992 but fell out of popularity in the early to mid 2000s after the introduction of commercial broadband in the late 1990s, except in rural or poorer areas where it tended to persist for a little while longer. (Hello from the rural areas.) Anyway, a dial-up connection is the least expensive way to access the Internet, but is also the slowest connection. (When I was a kid, I tried to watch a three minute video of the "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" song, and it took me at least an hour to load it without buffering. Though text based pages or images would maybe take a few minutes or so, so it wasn't like completely unusable.)

Also, due to how it's set up, you can't use the telephone (home phone) while connected, and if you were to try, it would make what we all know as the classic internet sounds, that you've probably heard even if you didn't know what it was: Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​*ding*ding*ding*. That's terrible phonetics, but I just took that off a search, I wasn't gonna try to type the sound out myself. This, anyway: X.

It honestly baffles me when people don't know what dial-up is, makes me feel old, but I can't hold it against anyone because if you didn't live in a rural area, most people got high speed or some variant thereof really really early on, and most people younger than me and even some older have always had it, so dial-up internet Georg (me), who still couldn't get a single image of a Nicolas Cage meme to load 8 years after the invention of the iPhone is an outlier and should not have been counted, apparently.

On that note, the store where I work at has frequent power outages, which always knocks out the internet to the debit machine, so I'll be like, sorry, we're on dial-up, and some people will smugly be like "oh I bet you don't remember dial-up," and I'll be like, "No, I, I had dial-up like all through high school," and their eyes will go wide, but I think it's mostly because 1. I look like I'm 12, but I'm very much not 12. and 2. Again, people not used to the rural experience, catches 'em off guard.

[kithpendragon]

I've suddenly noticed that I've never heard of an app that performs the same function as a dial-up modem. One that uses the phone app to generate a data stream with the Internet.

A quick search suggests I'm neither missing something obvious, nor the first person to think of this, so why no app? Artificial technical limitations? Actual technical limitations? Obscure contract bullshit?

[the-weirdo-games-two]

WEIRDO GAMES ROUND ONE

[ladyfarona]

And when your parents realized you'd tied up the only phoneline in the house they'd scream "GET OFF THE INTERNET!" Because. You know. You couldn't use the phone and be online at the same time. How did we survive that.

Anyways here's the box screaming noises for those who've never heard it.

remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave

[duranduratulsa]

The Sound of dial-up Internet

90's Fest Sounds of the 90's: Dial Up Internet #dialupinternet #durandurantulsas4thannual90sfest #90s #90sfest

[michaelworthy25]

[sideshow-tornado]

Images you can hear.

[samtheviking]

I identify so hard with all of this... this was/is my life...

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[busylazy]

If you've been around long enough to wait for the dial-up modem to connect...

You have mastered patience. 🙏

[adibkhorram]

So I'm checking out your tumblr and I see you have a Photo!! As your icon!! and I just about had a heart attack "is it safe, on this blue hellscape in a post-Cassandra-Claire world, to put your face out there" and then I saw you were an author. Okay. Carry on, friend. Safe internet travels to you.

lol i appreciate you, safe internet travels to you too

[tonydaddingham]

im going outside to scream at the moon, does anyone want anything

[greghatecrimes]

Thirteen.exe has stopped responding

(warning for slight flashing)

[nando161mando]

[elnerdo19v2]

And afterward we’ll tell them about the horrible sounds it made to actually connect to it @mi-hole-is-pink