
Reliving the Dial-Up Experience in 2020 - sysoleg
https://goughlui.com/2020/05/31/video-project-reliving-the-dial-up-experience-in-2020/
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Animats
Dial-up isn't dead. AOL still offers it.[1] There are still dial-up ISPs.
There are still parts of the US with no high-speed Internet. About a quarter
of US rural homes can't get a high-speed connection without buying a satellite
service.

[1] [https://getonline.aol.com/dialup](https://getonline.aol.com/dialup)

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karmakaze
Ah, this brings back memories. Beige PC clones. The POST beep. The TURBO
button. The hard drive head seek. Machinery-sounding fans. Cheap-ass 'voice'
modems that used the CPU instead of giving you an entire modem in hard/firm-
ware. The loooong boot times. Modem connect negotiation sounds.

What's that font on the pr.oxy/fileserver listing?

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userbinator
_This experience was in itself, reflective of the fact that “always on”
internet was not considered a necessity or normality_

...and now that it is, companies are taking advantage of that to make nearly
every new application phone home without your knowledge. The amount of network
traffic produced on a clean install of an OS like Win10 is disturbing to see.

 _Aside from this, direct connections from the browsers to secure HTTPS
websites was impossible due to the difference in cipher suite and SSL /TLS
protocol support, so I decided to use an Asus Tinkerboard running Nginx web
server to serve a miniproxy page that allows us to visit HTTPS sites and serve
them back as HTTP._

You can use something like Proxomitron which uses OpenSSL in MITM mode to get
TLS 1.2 and all of its newer crypto.

Another thing I miss about that era is the relative efficiency; computer
hardware wasn't as powerful, but on average, software seemed to be far closer
to its limits than it is today, Now, despite the increase in computing power,
software feels less efficient, and it leads to some _very_ visible
comparisons. My "daily driver" machine is rather old now, but will happily do
things like play 1080p video or render a complex PCB layout in 3D with
resources to spare; yet struggles, straining the CPU and RAM, when loading a
JS SPA whose functionality should seem to be far less demanding than the
former tasks.

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ipython
What I would love to build (or find someone else has already built) is a proxy
that transparently serves historical versions of pages from the internet
archive for projects like this one. Also don’t forget jwz mirrored the
original Netscape home page at its old location @ home.mcom.com. Brings back
such good memories from a time filled with wonder and positivity.

~~~
mycall
wayback machine?

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m0zg
US Robotics Courier modem would be able to do 56Kbps I bet. I used it in
Russia in the 90's on the shittiest landlines imaginable, it's the only one
that _really_ did the job.

~~~
yakkers
The problem with 56k is that it worked by having specialised hardware on the
ISP end for the modulation that made those speeds possible over a phone line.
As far as I know, no consumer modem can really do that, so you’re stuck with
33.6k or worse.

~~~
m0zg
Not really. I reliably got 56K. Maybe the ISP had the hardware, I don't know.
I had this one:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=us+robotics+courier+v.everyt...](https://www.google.com/search?q=us+robotics+courier+v.everything)

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yakkers
Reminds me of the time I had a bit of fun with the modems I had lying around
in my old tech drawers. Set up a small Debian system with a modem connected to
the PSTN, got mgetty running to accept incoming calls.

Finding a friend who still had a PSTN line themselves was surprisingly
difficult (in Australia, we’re moving away from PSTN in favour of VoIP), but I
found one.

I only managed to get a remote shell going, but if I had more time to play
around with it I probably could have got PPP up and running. Having someone
else on the other end for a multiplayer DOOM session over dialup would have
been really cool.

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quink
I’ve been following Gough Lui for a while, there’s plenty else worth checking
out on his blog, btw.

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reustle
So funny seeing this now. I'm sitting in a doctor's office waiting room right
now for routine maintenance, and I keep hearing the fax call sounds from
behind the desk. It's alive and well here.

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2snakes
As I recall there used to be software (installable and appliance both) that
would emulate dial-up speeds and behavior when when on a high-speed
connection.

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brokenmachine
Why go to all this effort to experience shitty internet when you could just be
in Australia?

