Dial-up! Oh, you young soul who enjoys WiFi and high-speed streaming, let me tell you that we've gone through very dark times. Dial-up connections were the purest example of a necessary evil: slow, unstable, creators of daily family conflicts, and fundamentally expensive. A couple of years ago we explored the torture of browsing the modern Web with a simple telephone line, but last week, John Glasscock decided to shape a new definition of madness by downloading GTA V for PS4 over dial-up…
If you want to download an AAA game through Steam or another digital store, it will most likely take a couple of days, although it all depends on your final connection speed. For example, DOOM took six days here, with some pauses midway. To be honest, once the download was finished, I discovered that I no longer felt like playing, and I imagine more than one person has gone through the same thing. Now, what you can't imagine is what that experience would be like in the middle of the 90s, when we were chained to the tyranny of dial-up… or maybe you can?
Today, dial-up is little more than a personal project, a retro whim that many YouTubers recreate seeking a massive dose of nostalgia. In fact, there is already dedicated hardware to emulate dial-up and connect old computers without Ethernet support. But there are modern platforms that still support dial-up, and one of them (although not directly) is the PlayStation 4. John Glasscock connected his console to the network that way, and decided to download... GTA V.
Downloading GTA V for PS4 over Dial-Up
This is not John's first connectivity experiment. He is also known for using Windows XP on a 1,000-megabit link, and for his 5G downloads (e.g., PUBG Mobile in less than 20 seconds) However... GTA V. Dial-up. Whole countries can collapse in less time. His adventure began on January 24. On February 19, he gave the console a couple of days of rest, with 13.35 GB. On February 23, he had already surpassed the 15-gigabyte barrier, and by March 4, he did the same with 20 gigabytes.
Now, let's not forget that GTA V and other games on PS4 have a download floor that enables them to run while the rest of the resources are obtained in the background. That historic moment happened on March 13, with 1,098 hours and 59 minutes on the clock. Total? 25.19 gigabytes. The complete GTA V package exceeds 69 gigabytes, and with scheduled pauses, it would probably need 2,000 more hours. Another interesting fact is that we can calculate his rest periods. Between January 24 and March 13 there are 48 days, or 1,152 hours. If we subtract 1,099 hours, we get 53 hours, about 2.2 days.
Personally, I am amazed by the stability of the connection. Would you like to experience the 'glory' of dial-up on your computer? The ideal would be to do it with tools from that era, and that means choosing an appropriate browser. Something pre-Netscape, perhaps?
