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Back in the early 90s, when a fast modem was still excruciatingly slow, a webpage could (and did!) take tens of minutes to load. I tried downloading a six megabyte file once which used up about 4 hours of my monthly quota, only for the file transfer to be aborted right near the end. I nearly cried.

Most of us then used UUCP to send and receive our email, usenet, etc from the Net. A typical call lasted 15 to 20 minutes sometimes.

Only the rich power-users could afford to log in more than once a day, it was too expensive otherwise. And the service providers were charging an arm and a leg per hour, with a monthly contract total of say 30 hours.

Around that time, one of the local members of the user-group posted to say that he had sent an email across the Net to the US, and had received a reply within 10 minutes! We were astounded at the speed of that turnaround.

Also about then, somebody told us that they had heard that the total number of computers on the Net had reached a whole million. Again, we were astounded. We literally couldn't envisage that within a decade, that number would reach billions.

And don't get me started on how twitchy I got when the 'always-on' broadband era arrived. I kept getting thoughts of thousands and thousands of dollars of provider charges racking up every month. <grin>




I was on the net in the early 90's and before, and maybe I'm wearing my rose-colored glasses today, but I don't recall any web pages taking anywhere close to ten minutes to load. Maybe a minute at worst. I don't think I'd have had the patience to browse the web otherwise.

Though computers were less powerful and network speeds were comparably slow, web pages were mostly really lightweight back then, not the bloated monstrosities we have today (though even then there were some atrocious ad-infested websites, which were slow.. but not 10 minutes per page slow, in my experience).

Also, I seem to recall that downloading my first mp3, which was about 3 MB in size took around 30 minutes back in the day.

I don't doubt that downloading that 4 MB file and viewing that webpage was as slow for you as you reported, but I do wonder if maybe you were using a really old modem for they day. I think by the time I first started accessing the internet I must have had a 9600 baud modem, and not many years later switched to 56k ISDN. How about you?

PS: I just remembered that pretty early on in the web's history, I read about some study which found that if a website responded in more than 200 milliseconds, most people considered that slow, and I remember thinking that that observation fit pretty well with my experience. So I think pretty much from the beginning websites must have overall been responding in well under a second as a rule, and even back in the day taking a full minute (nevermind 10 minutes) would have been considered unacceptably slow.


Yeah...back in the 90s, a webpage was a text file, usually a couple of Kb tops, maybe a small gif or three. No pulling in Mb of frameworks, no client side executable content, just plain content. If it took 10m to load at 9600, you were doing it wrong (or were targeting the folks with DDS/T1/T3 connectivity). If you were serving out a big file, you often did it over FTP.


> I tried downloading a six megabyte file once which used up about 4 hours of my monthly quota, only for the file transfer to be aborted right near the end. I nearly cried.

The ability to resume an interrupted transfer was a huge benefit in the ZMODEM protocol, as compared to its predecessors XMODEM and YMODEM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM

There were lots of innovations in this area, many of them having to do with how unreliable modem connections could be (both in terms of possibly un-hardware-corrected line noise, and in terms of the risk of having your connection hang up in the middle).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_transfer_pr...

I sure felt safer when I was downloading a big file with ZMODEM rather than XMODEM. :-)



This nostalgia-laced post deserves an upvote just for the closing <grin>. I thought that was lost to the ages...

I miss my 9600 Baud Hayes external modem...

Kids these days won't understand the feeling that you got when the modem connection noise sounded right, and you knew you were going to get a good speed, and when it sounded off – even though you eventually connected at a certain speed, you didn't trust it...


I miss my 9600 Baud Hayes external modem...

9600! Looxery, Lad! For many years 300 baud was the maximum I had. Then 1200, 2400, and at long last 9600! And those damned things were hundreds of dollars.

deserves an upvote just for the closing <grin>

One of the local UUCP group mentioned above habitually used <smirk>.

:)


I remember when modems cost about a dollar per baud: 300 for $300, 1200 for $1200.


I remember when every incremental advance in modem speeds and standards was a big thing. Companies like Sparco[0] were major movers.

At home, moving up from a 300/1200 external modem to a 9600bps internal (backplane card) was huge.

I was first on Usenet in 1986. My employer didn't have a full-time connection then, just a modem that would autoconnect every few hours to upload and download email/Usenet/etc. This was before domain addressing, where you would have to give a full navigation path from a well-known server like decwrl or uunet. I was literally the first person in my company to put my long form email address on my business cards (before @(domain) addressing).

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/unistarsparcocomputers/




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