Just caught this tweet from a colleague:

“Mom, I have a call at 1:30 so don’t use the internet.” HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

He was, of course, lampooning one of his friends who has the misfortune of visiting his parents who are still apparently using dial-up Internet. It took me back for a moment:

Back Then (1991)

When I was 11, our incoming Freshmen at IU East were just being born. The Internet, as we know it, did not exist.

We had a 486 SX desktop computer with a processor that was 25MHz, a 121 MB hard drive, 1MB graphics card capable of 256 color graphics, and 4 MB of RAM. (a later upgrade to 8MB cost $160) The modem we had, which connected over landline, would tie up our phone while I used it;  it could also only transfer 2400 bps (aka “baud”). (note that the lowercase “b” there indicates BITS and not BYTES. 2400 bps is roughly equal to 300 bytes per second, or Bps)

My friends and I would connect to local bulletin-board systems (BBS’s), which were kind of like websites: there was mail features, multi-user games, files to download, and you could communicate with people far away via mail relay services like FIDONet. To give you an idea about speed: when you would load a “page” on the BBS (login screen, a game, a filelist, etc.) you could literally see the text appear on the screen as it was received. It was that slow.

Downloading a single image (hot girls, funny pictures, desktop wallpaper, etc.) took anywhere from a solid minute for a small (15 kilobyte) image. A larger image, say 50kB, would take about 3 minutes. For a frame of reference, the banner at the top of this blog, featuring my picture and “Two-year-olds think I’m awesome”, is 22kB (about a minute and a half) and the entire web page is roughly 500kB.

That would have taken a half-hour. Just to load http://blog.amhill.net.

I am not even kidding.

Again, remember that this was before the world wide web. We didn’t have “Internet Service Providers” such as Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner, etc.

1992

When I was 12  I was fortunate enough to get access to the Internet (pre-world wide web) via my mom’s university account. I would dial-up via land-line, log in to their UNIX server, and then I could connect to computers in far away places instantaneously. I used Telnet to connect to a university in Australia and chatted with someone there. My dad had a hard time believing it was not racking up a long distance bill. I used the Gopher service to find the script to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “download” it to my university account, and then print it out. I still have that print-out somewhere. It was absolutely AMAZING.

Back then, file-sharing was typically small games. There was no way to easily distribute music or movies since the file-sizes were so prohibitive (Mp3 and DivX encoding didn’t exist back then). My friends and I shared stuff on 3.5″ floppy disks, capable of storing 1.44MB (about 30 pictures, but most of what we shared were games and text files)

1993

The first Internet service provider in our area, PenTeleData / Prolog began offering dial-up service for $19.95 per month. You could connect to the graphical internet, view web pages in a “Web Browser”. At the time, your choices were either Netscape, which would later become Firefox (sort-of), or NCSA’s Mosaic, which would later become Internet Explorer. Gopher, Archie, Veronica, FTP, Telnet, USENET, IRC and other UNIX services had graphical front-ends that made it a little easier to use. (Quick comparison: Gopher was like Google. FTP was like BitTorrent, USENET is like an Internet Forum, and IRC is sort of like IM’ing, but more like a “chat room”)

I think that at this point we had a modem upgrade: 14.4 kbps (again, lowercase “b” means it’s actually: 1.8 kBps). You could load a web-page in 5-10 seconds. Back then, a web page had a handful of images at most, lots of text, and no visual aesthetic. There were so few web pages that there was actually a book called “The Internet Yellow Pages” which listed most of the interesting sites out there. Again, not kidding.

1994-1995

PenTeleData / Prolog (affiliated with our local cable company) offered what may have been the first commercial cable Internet access anywhere in the country. It was terrible. It boasted speeds of up to 500kbps (62.5 kBps, or 1 image per second), but rarely worked that well. My uncle had it. When it worked, it was AMAZING, but that was rare.

1996

When I was 16, I built my first computer: 586 (Pentium) 133MHz, 1GB hard drive, 16 MB of RAM, 4 or 8 MB video card (capable of millions of colors) and a 56 kbps (7 kBps) dial-up modem. It also had a CD-burner. Mp3 technology finally existed, so it was possible to share song files with other people, although there were no Peer-to-peer clients, so we all used IRC (chat rooms) to directly send them to one another, or you would just download them directly off of web pages. Really. Out in plain sight. Some sites would get taken down, but they’d pop up elsewhere. Downloading short video clips was possible, but not wide-spread yet — they were still rather large.

Instead of using floppy-disks for file-sharing, we used burnt CDs. It’s worth noting that not all “file-sharing” was piracy back then either — sharing files often meant sharing free software, pictures, and text files. It was POSSIBLE to copy CDs, of course. But the technology was so primitive that it quite literally took 60 minutes to burn a 60 minute CD — and you weren’t guaranteed it wouldn’t have skips in it. Blank CD-Rs cost just over $1 apiece.

Downloading a single 5 minutes song took about 17 minutes if your connection was GOOD (5 kB /s) — I was never able to truly get the possible 7 kB/s that was theoretically possible with my modem. Loading a single web page took 5-10 seconds. (If that doesn’t sound like much, get a watch with a second-hand and count it out. EVERY page took that long, assuming they didn’t use many images). Loading this website (blog.amhill.net) would have taken 1 minutes and 45 seconds. It was slow compared to today, but compared to what we had 2 years prior, it was AMAZING.

There were several search engines: Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista, Excite, and MSN (a few others, but I don’t remember their names). Netscape had just recently lost the “browser war” with Internet Explorer (formerly NCSA’s Mosaic — terrible then, and still terrible). Google was either non-existent or so primitive it wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Most web browsing was done by typing in the often-obfuscated URL’s of websites you wanted to visit — “searching” the Internet wasn’t nearly as reliable or useful as it is now. Bookmark files were SOOOOOO helpful.

Oh, and my uncle got me a copy of Slackware Linux that year. Anyone who complains about Linux being difficult now should have seen it then. Wow.

1998

In 1998, my first semester of college, I got an ISDN connection which required special hardware ($250 on ebay) and paid about that much again for a 128 kbps (16 kB/s) connection to the Internet. It took about 2 weeks to get it working, and we didn’t have any phone at all during that period (apologies to my roommate Jim).  It wasn’t nearly as awesome as I had hoped, although it was faster. We didn’t have high-speed LAN connections in our dorm rooms yet.

On the other hand, the computer labs DID have high-speed Internet. I remember finding a hot FTP site in New Zealand via an IRC buddy. I think they had done some nefarious activity to get the account, and then dumped a whole bunch of pirated software up there. I carted my PC into the lab at 2 in the morning hoping to capitalize on the opportunity but I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. So I never got the pirated software. :/ (One of the programs was an early version of Photoshop or Illustrator, if I recall)

The World Wide Web was at an awkward stage. Commercial enterprises had just woken up and realized all of the potential monetization possibilities in the Internet (hence the “.com bubble”) and so you all of a sudden started seeing advertisements EVERYWHERE. HTML was still pretty basic, but people had started to use tables to format their websites to look sharp. Design aesthetic was beginning to creep into the Internet, and professional looking websites were starting to show up. CSS did not yet exist. AJAX? Heck no. Web scripting was mostly done via Perl and other inane languages. JavaScript was all the rage, and you saw annoying marquees, dialog boxes, alerts, and Window status text CONSTANTLY. Search engines were becoming far more prevalent, more reliable, and more useful. I think Google was around by now, but it was still very basic. Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista and Ask.com were all the big players.

Online video, particularly streaming, was still not widely used. People shared video clips on IRC chatrooms (occasionally on FTP, but mostly IRC). There were funny videos, short clips, porn, and music videos. The kinds of stuff you see on youtube now, except if you wanted to download any of it, there was a file ratio (usually); so you had to upload 1 MB of photos / videos to download 5 MB. I think I still have some Radiohead music videos and funny advertisements from back then.

I don’t *think* Shawn Fanning had yet created Napster, but I can’t be sure. I’m pretty sure that file-sharing still required you to physically exchange media or do it directly via FTP / Web.

Today: A Retrospective Comparison

The laptop I am typing this on is one of 4 computers in this house, 3 of which are laptops. It has a Pentium Core 2 Duo (2 processors in one CPU) and clocks in at 3 GHz. My desktop now has a single-core 3 GHz cpu. 1 GHz  = 1,000 MHz. My desktop is 120 times as fast as that first computer I mentioned in the very beginning. The laptop: doubly so (2 cores).

Both my desktop and my laptop have 4 GB of RAM. GIGA-bytes. 1GB = 1,000 MB. Compared to my first computer, I have 1,000x as much memory as I did then. What’s even crazier is that 4GB of RAM costs about $130. It costs LESS to buy 4GB  now than it did to buy 4MB 18 years ago. The prices are probably about equal if you adjust for inflation.

My hard drive in this laptop is 300 GB; Compared to the 121 MB of that first computer. In the desktop we have now? 750GB. Nearly a Terabyte (TB).  For perspective on that size difference: 1 compact disc holds approximately 700MB of data (just under 6x that first hard drive). A DVD holds 4 GB (just under 6 compact discs). My desktop hard-drive can hold as much data as 188 DVDs.

My video card can display millions of colors, has its own internal CPU (and heat-sink), and has 512MB of dedicated memory. 512 times as much as that first computer, and infinitely better quailty display.

I have a DVD-RW/CD-RW combo drive that can reliably burn a DVD (remember: 6x as much data as a CD) in about 5 to 10 minutes. It can burn a regular CD in about 2, sometimes less.

The Internet is just ridiculous now.

We have a DSL connection through Parallax (a local ISP) that rates at 6MB/s (that’s megaBYTE there too…). I just tested it on speedtest.net, and I’m realizing about 4MB of that total 6MB. This could be because I am accessing it wirelessly.

Think about that for a moment. I am accessing the Internet, through thin air, at a speed that is 13,333 times faster than that first computer could with a hard-line connection. Even that fast ISDN connection was only 1/250th of this speed, and that required a hard-line as well. If I was able to fully realize the full bandwidth available (all 6MB) I would be closer to 20,000 times faster and 375 times faster, respectively.

At this speed, I can download a 5-minute song in a matter of NINE SECONDS. This blog webpage loads practically instaneously; The bottleneck is not in the speed of my connection, but simply because it has to make so many individual connections to download all of the text and images on the page (a few dozen).

We can watch a full-length movie on Netflix on both the desktop AND one of the laptops, SIMULTANEOUSLY, without any buffering problems. You can use a peer-to-peer network such as BitTorrent to download the latest Ubuntu ISO (700MB) in about 3 minutes. That’s faster than it took to download a 5 minutes song on ISDN. My wife and I can video conference, in GMail, with audio, in a matter of seconds, and it has very little lag.

When Sullivan turned 2, we had a birthday party. We used Skype to connect Melissa’s laptop to my sister Abby, who was home visiting my Mom in the Poconos, PA, roughly 600 miles away. We had the Skype call running the whole time, so my family was able to see and talk to Sullivan, my friends, and all of us as if they were here. They were able to remotely sing Happy Birthday to him and then watch him blow out his candles.  Oh, and it cost us nothing to do this.

In 1996 there was an estimated 250,000 sites. The exact number now is hard to determine, but if we take a rough estimate based on how many pages Google indexes (a few billion), assume half of them are duplicates / redundant, and then shave off a half billion because, well, why the hell not — you still end up with a billion or more pages. 4,000 times as much content as in 1996. At the drop of a hat, you can find the answer to virtually any question you could ever think to ask within seconds.

And yet, in spite of all of this, I bitch when Hulu shows re-runs of my favorite TV shows.

As an aside, what is the most remarkable about all of this is that the US is not even the leader in Internet access. Japan, China, Scandinavia, and much of Europe all have faster Internet connections that are cheaper because their communications infrastructure is not monopolized by private enterprise the way ours is. As far as developing nations are concerned — our Internet is about as good as our healthcare / working conditions are, and it is lagging for much of the same reasons too.

Popularity: 4% [?]