I turn on my computer. The screen flickers, I hear a humming faintly. The speakers pop as I double click the internet shortcut. I double-click. A faint dial tone begins hearing the sharp metallic sound. A stuttering sequence of beeps comences, like two machines trying to communicate with each other. I hear static, screeching and hissing. It is the chaotic symphony to announce your entrance to the world wide web. I see the 56k modem light blinking and I am online. his sound is now almost comforting.
Downloading pictures one pixel row at a time was a wild thing. The page litteraly crawled slowly into existence before your eyes half picture half blank. A single image felt like it took forever to load. The progress bar that never quite reached the end. Videos were another thing, you had to wait half an hour or more for really low quality videos that you’d play on realplayer. Some could take hours. Choosing what to download or not invovled a lot of thinking if it was even worth it. Nowadays you don’t even think about it, it takes longer to delete it at times than it does to download it.
I had a secret weapon for the low speeds however. This was before tabbed browsing was a thing but I realized that I would wait for something to load, read it and then click something else only to wait for that to load and then read. I the realized I could just instead of having one maximized browser I could have up to 4 different browsers open at the same time and have them be just big enough that I could switch between them just like tabs are used nowadats. I would click on stuff and go to the other ‘tab’ to read and so on, that way I barely spent any time waiting on stuff to load as the other pages were loading
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Each internet provider had a different sounding modem sound, but that whole sound was a ritual. To me it got me all excited and got me anticipating. When you’d get a “you’ve got mail” notification, you knew something cool was waiting, even if it wasn’t always the case. This was if you used AOL, but even other services had similar features with a voice telling you about email being delivered. I remember compuserve having a female voice which to me made it sound better.
Earthlink was another provider I remember using as well as one that was free and took 40% of the screen with ads but hey it was free internet. I actually don’t remember downloads failing because someone picked up the phone or called but it was indeed common for downloads to fail near the end which was incredibly frustrating. Somehow you’d actually be able to download video, usually in .rm format for real player, quality was awful but hey it got the job done before p2p became a thing.
Sometimes while dialing up you’d get an error, this is how I started becoming tech savvy as I needed to figure it out, it was usually some type of TCP IP error. There was nothing worse than a fail connection, you dialed up but it just didn’t connect.
Now websites were another thing but I love how original they were before sites became the same thing everywhere in Web 2.0. There was so much originality and even if well they were rather basic. They were specifically designed for people who would not have high speed.
The internet has changed a lot, but there was something special about Web 1.0 and that’s because of the speed. 56k modems just couldn’t handle much but they were still an upgrade from modems in the past and 56k became the defacto standard for many years. In a way a better, more uncentralized individual internet.