What was the internet like in the 90s?

[Howard]

Who was that guy on this forum that kept trying to prove that software modems were just as good? He kept posting screencaps of tracerts or something, on a Lucent-based modem.

 

[lxskllr]

Who was that guy on this forum that kept trying to prove that software modems were just as good? He kept posting screencaps of tracerts or something, on a Lucent-based modem.

It was more recent than the 90s, but I had a great BCM soft modem. Great connection speeds, and solid throughput. I tried a hard modem, but you couldn't make something from nothing. My soft modem was as good as it got. Unfortunately, it didn't work with GNU/Linux, and it held up my adoption by a couple of years.

 

[Fritzo]

Who was that guy on this forum that kept trying to prove that software modems were just as good? He kept posting screencaps of tracerts or something, on a Lucent-based modem.

SOftware modems sucked until PC's had enough horsepower to run them properly.

 

[agharta]

Everything was so expensive back in the 90s.
I recall buying a 14.4K modem for ~£80 as the 28.8k models were almost twice as much.
You paid an ISP at least £15 a month for access plus you had to pay for your phone connection. So you could be spending £30+ per month for just a 14.4K connection.
I remember using Napster with a 56K modem and that led to many partial files.
I vividly remember the first time I had access to broadband which was generally 512kb then and it blew me away. The jump from 56Kb to 512Kb seemed so much more dramatic than 512Kb to 5Mb.

Two words: Real Player

That was such poor software. I had a large music collection and it failed to even import it all. Sorting was ridiculously slow, just terrible.

 

[shortylickens]

Lulz, lurkers crawl out of the woodwork just to bash Real Player.

 

[OverVolt]

I put a real player install from 2003 on my rig with 16Gb of memory and the taskbar icon still took all my memory.

 

[Crow550]

Real Player is still alive: http://www.real.com/

 

[sdifox]

Real Player is still alive: http://www.real.com/

or use real alternative. That is a great name :biggrin:

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/real_alternative.htm

 

[Crow550]

I'd never use either.... VLC is just fine.

Wow though. Surprised Real Alternative is also still kicking.

 

[jae]

Realplayer and musicmatch jukebox... ahh..

 

[IronWing]

I preferred tucows.

Tucows was so awesome 'til one day they just sucked.

 

[lxskllr]

I was looking at some of my old wallpapers today. The "large" size back then was 1024x768 :^D

 

[MarkXIX]

One day I will tell my children how I lived through the "instant messaging wars" and came out alive.

Also, I still remember that feeling the first time I fired up Quake on my 3dfx PCI Voodoo card.

 

[shortylickens]

One day I will tell my children how I lived through the "instant messaging wars" and came out alive.

Also, I still remember that feeling the first time I fired up Quake on my 3dfx PCI Voodoo card.

Cant imagine why. It would have looked exactly the same on a 1MB Trident VESA card.

 

[MarkXIX]

Cant imagine why. It would have looked exactly the same on a 1MB Trident VESA card.

I remember it slightly differently, perhaps time has clouded my thoughts.

http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/quake.htm

 

[shortylickens]

It was 3D rendered but not 3D accelerated. That Voodoo card wouldnt have done anything special for you.

Quake 2 was the first in that line to be 3D accelerated. it could also run in software, and actually didnt look half bad.

 

[SagaLore]

Trumpet Winsock.

AOL floppy disks.

MS ComicChat.

Looking back at the typical hardware, software, and user interfaces... we've come a long way. Tablets, wifi and html5, its a completely different universe.

 

[chetansha]

One day I will tell my children how I lived through the "instant messaging wars" and came out alive.

Also, I still remember that feeling the first time I fired up Quake on my 3dfx PCI Voodoo card.

I remember the huge voodoo card, I travelled to Singapore to get that card.( could not find one in india at that time)

 

[BuffaloChuck]

In the USA, there was no "56k" phone lines, by the way. It was "53.3k" at best. I visited tons of BBSs for work-related projects, and set up quite a few BBS servers with those huge 4-, 8- and 16-line cards with racks of modems, or using IBM Series/1's for those.

Dialing into all of them was an adventure - everyone connected in at different speeds. Different load levels, long-distance calling fees - the Internet's emergence was a good punch-in-the-mouth to all of those.

Dial-up's, by the way, still exist and huge portions of North America still subsist on DSL or less because most folks still don't live in urban jungles. And few folks' grand ideals of "making it" include staying bunkered in some urban jungle either. Let's hope for Sat-based wireless or that the Gov't opens up the American fibre optics (which were installed countrywide in the '90s) to all citizens.

 

[CZroe]

Cant imagine why. It would have looked exactly the same on a 1MB Trident VESA card.

GLQuake or any of the other accelerated executables = very different from software-rendered Quake. 3dfx ran it with miniGL instead of Glide and it was AWESOME.

It was 3D rendered but not 3D accelerated. That Voodoo card wouldnt have done anything special for you.

Quake 2 was the first in that line to be 3D accelerated. it could also run in software, and actually didnt look half bad.

WRONG. It was beautifully accelerated on 3dfx with miniGL. 3dfx saw to it because there were so many Quake engine games. It wasn't a full OpenGL implementation, but it was everything Quake engine used.

 

[blotto]

GLQuake or any of the other accelerated executables = very different from software-rendered Quake. 3dfx ran if with miniGL instead of Glide and it was AWESOME.



WRONG. It was beautifully accelerated on 3dfx with miniGL. 3dfx saw to it because there were so many Quake engine games. It wasn't a full OpenGL implementation, but it was everything Quake engine used.

Exactly, GLQuake was THE killer app for the early years of 3D accelerated graphics. It was the first thing I fired up when I got my Voodoo 1 and after playing quake for months in software rendering, was an amazing experience.

 

[cardiac]

Back in the 90's, ICQ was coming into it's own as a messaging site. I haven't used it in 15 years, and just went back the other day and was still able to log in.....

 

[shortylickens]

Back in the 90's, ICQ was coming into it's own as a messaging site. I haven't used it in 15 years, and just went back the other day and was still able to log in.....

I havent used it in 15 years. Back then not everybody in the barracks had a computer so I was very popular. Guys installed every IM program there was on my laptop.
I had many conversations with complete strangers.
It wasnt that much fun.

 

[CraigRT]

Back in the 90's, ICQ was coming into it's own as a messaging site. I haven't used it in 15 years, and just went back the other day and was still able to log in.....

I used it recently too, still works. I still remember my UIN. Easily one of my top memories of 90's internet (ICQ) It was the only thing to use back then, and it's all I had. I never use AIM or Yahoo Chat.

Nowadays its just Google Talk for my friends who use it.

 

[billyevans]

Loud. Damn modem.