Does the throttling your provider applies to streaming bother you? Are you tired of counting gigabytes in your data plan? These are privileges compared to what we had to do to browse the Internet 25 years ago. And that brings us to the page of Doctor Gough Lui, who decided to reproduce the dial-up experience with the era's hardware and visit some modern pages, or rather, make the attempt...
In the '90s, we had to call by phone to browse the Internet. The phrase sounds like it comes from a meme with Grandpa Simpson as the protagonist, but it's not an exaggeration; it's the pure truth. After fighting with mothers/sisters for the line and waiting for the blessed flat-rate schedule, the modem would start singing the song of its people, and all we could do was pray. Pray for a stable connection, for an extra half kilobyte of transfer, for our physical integrity when the phone bill arrived at the end of the month.
Yes, broadband was the definitive solution that helped us escape such torture, but there's always that adventurer who decides to go back 25 years in time to reproduce the dial-up experience. Today we discover Doctor Gough Lui, who didn't limit himself to emulating a compatible environment, but prepared a computer appropriate for the era, and I would even dare say slightly obsolete...
The experience of using dial-up and Windows 98 to browse today
It's not a mistake: the computer actually needed more than two minutes to reach the desktop. Gough used in this experiment a Techway Endeavour II equipped with a Pentium processor at 100 MHz, 32 MB of RAM in 72-pin SIMM format, a Fujitsu hard drive with IDE interface of 2.6 GB, SIS 6326 video in PCI mode, a Sony floppy drive, and of course, an ESS TeleDrive modem with a maximum speed of 56k. Windows 98 SE, Netscape 4.8, and Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 form the main software selection on the computer, but the story doesn't end there.
In essence, Gough had to create his own dial-up provider and install a proxy to process each visited site. The reason is a combination of HTTPS, CSS, and JavaScript, technologies that were not fully implemented in those years and that old browsers cannot interpret correctly. The link speed is about 31.2 kilobits per second, which means everything is slow, including sites we now consider relatively lightweight. Even when fetching files from his server, the download averages 3 kilobytes per second, a normal number for the late '90s.
In summary, the experience of using dial-up to access the modern Web is pure pain. We come for nostalgia and celebrate Gough's work, but we leave a little scared. Beyond the good memories, we can never go back to those speeds...
Official site: Click here
