Current Events > Did you have dial up internet at home, or did you jump straight in on broadband?

(+) Yeah! (+)

80/80

Trip down memory lane time.

For our younger users, be grateful you never had to deal with the pain in the ass that is dial up internet. I still remember when we got internet at home, started with 56k from a company called Supanet, which I dont think even exists anymore.

I still can vividly remember the sound of our modem dial up tone. Of course everything took bloody forever, want to watch A crappy 240p video that lasts about a minute, hope you several hours free in your day, and woe betide your sorry ass if you ever try to download anything.

Then of course there are the matching practical headaches, nothing like losing connection due to someone trying to use the phone. Fun times, many an email was lost due to this in my early net days, eventually I took to them writing them in MS word first then copying and pasting when I was ready to send due to anxiety over this. Great fun especially when you are emailing out applications for jobs and college courses.

Over to you now, CE.

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Didn't everybody have dial up internet?

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IloveJesus posted...

Didn't everybody have dial up internet?

I doubt anyone born after 2000 used broadband.

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We had dialup the first few years. Like 3 or 4 years maybe before we got broadband

LightningCamaro posted...

I bought anyone born after 2000 used broadband.

If that's the case, surely your topic is really just asking how old people are?

Also, I thought the average user on gfaqs was about 30?

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Dial up initially, but I wasn't playing games on it. I have very clear memories of looking up pokemon cheats and falling for clickbaits lol. It was always some convoluted instructions that "you might have to try this several times" in order to get something that didn't even exist in the game.

dial-up until 2001.

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I had dial-up all the way up until I went to college in 2013

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My first internet computer had a 33.6k modem. It was pretty slow. We upgraded to broadband once it became economically viable. I watched them go from 10GB down/500MB up hard caps to virtually unlimited bandwidth, with throttling.
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Beep beep beep beep beeedong beeedong booooooop

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Dial up, then satalite, now dsl

We got dial up in 97, sat in 2003, and dsl in 2011. Dls is 1.5 mbs

Still no broadband. This is at my parents, where I grew up. I not live with them now.

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I played Starcraft and Diablo on dial-up

Always hated losing a game when my mom would forget I was online and pick up the phone.

My dad started playing games online year or so after I had and wasnt long after that we ended up getting cable internet

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Solid_Seb posted...

Dial up initially, but I wasn't playing games on it. I have very clear memories of looking up pokemon cheats and falling for clickbaits lol. It was always some convoluted instructions that "you might have to try this several times" in order to get something that didn't even exist in the game.

When I was at high school, the school computers all had 512k DSL connections, which were warp speed fast compared to dial up of most home connection. The very first I ever looked up online was cheats for Killer Instinct on the SNES.

Still remember a classmate getting hauled in front of the principal for printing off a walkthrough for Super Mario 64 which was over 100 pages long.


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Had dial-up until 2007.

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Soggy_Pocket posted...

Beep beep beep beep beeedong beeedong booooooop

https://youtu.be/aV8DEJ8ydJQ


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Dial up due to being 30 years old.

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We were poor so of course I had dial up growing up.

First had internet in the late 90s, I fondly remember the Outlook Express interface on my brother's computer, downloading pictures of Brak from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, looking up cheats a site that was "central" to codes, and playing such hits as Utopia and Phantasm IV (which is somehow still around though I doubt anyone still plays it, even back then it only had a dozen or so players).

Never had the AOL experience though, we always had the standalone stuff (GeoNet or Earth Geo or something like that).

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DuranOfForcena posted...

yeah we had 56k dial up for quite awhile, and we lived out in the sticks and the lines were really bad so it was actually only 28.8k

Same, ours rad in the mid 30s even though the modem was 56

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We had dial-up up until the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002.

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We got an extra phone line and an additional internet contract so my step dad could get online to day trade stocks and not knock anyone else off and if that's not the most 1999-2001 thing ever.

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Majority of my youth was dial up. Had it way too long as well. Spending an hour to load a YouTube video lol. How far we've come

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FrankGoreHOF posted...

Majority of my youth was dial up. Had it way too long as well. Spending an hour to load a YouTube video lol. How far we've come

The whole time keeping your fingers crossed the connection didn't get dropped.

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Definitely don't miss dial up. We also had an 80 hour limit for the month for the whole household lol.

SauI_Goodman posted...

Definitely don't miss dial up. We also had an 80 hour limit for the month for the whole household lol.

I probably do that many hours in a week never mind a month. <_<

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What is dial up and broadband? All I've ever had is fiber.

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Kraidette posted...

What is dial up and broadband? All I've ever had is fiber.

Fiber is a form of broadband internet connection, though.

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What was AOL considered

We had that til like 2000

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We were too broke for internet during the dial up days. Our cable company was one of the first to offer broadband in the country and eventually became spectrum

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Yeah we had EarthLink dial up... I wanna say around 1999 or 1998

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Tired-Insomniac posted...

What was AOL considered

We had that til like 2000

AOL was (and ... apparently at least up until 2017 was still) a dial-up internet provider. In 2017 apparently over 2 million people were still using it for dial-up yeesh

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After 2000?

Shit, there is still like, a third of Louisiana that doesn't have access to real broadband internet.

There are more than a few places where the only options are dial up, satellite, and cellphone.

Hell, my father still only have dial up for his computer and his Verizon plan for his cell phone.

We had dial-up for a while, but we were sort of early to jump into broadband (DSL) when it became publicly available.

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Didn't get dsl until I was like 13.

Luckily we had 2 phone lines, so I never had an issue with phone calls interrupting the connection
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I had 56k dial up for a long time. We evetually got DSL, but not before I had been trying to download mp3s at least a little.

I had dial-up until 2008, it was rough.

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I didn't have the internet until 2004, and I was on dial up until 2010

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dial up from 96 to 01
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i live in rural north carolina and i still have dialup
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I had dial up. Earthlink was awesome.

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Esrac posted...

After 2000?

Shit, there is still like, a third of Louisiana that doesn't have access to real broadband internet.

There are more than a few places where the only options are dial up, satellite, and cellphone.

Hell, my father still only have dial up for his computer and his Verizon plan for his cell phone.

if the US gets technology to improve it can still cover all the areas that are still blacked out from getting some form of broadband. on topic i had dial-up when i was 14. DSL when i was 24. and experienced the agony of satellite internet when i was 25.

it was a rough 2 years with it. if my step-grandmother didn't have that urge of going to olkahoma i would of been stuck at that house right now. living in town was better anyway. there was some silver lining (was able to adopt a dog out of the deal) grandfather liked dogs.

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My dialup was from 1998 to about 2004.

But I did know someone who was still using it in 2010 because it's all they had at their location.

Had to come and install a new modem for them since I have half ass knowledge on computers.


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I had dial-up for a bit, from NTL (UK), now Virgin Media. It was shit, but I got by.

Didn't have internet until 2001 when we moved to a more populous place and then got broadband. My dad thought dial-up was way too slow so he wasn't going to have internet until he had an option that he thought was actually usable.

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I had Dockpoint, Earthlink, Embarq, and then CenturyLink.

I still keep CenturyLink as my homepage though it's not my current provider.

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Wow I guess I was one of the lucky ones had dial up in 98-99 and got broadband in 00 I used to sell music CDs back in 8th grade made a ton of money. Eventually I moved up to selling movies as well.

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Dialup on a dedicated line from 96 till like 00 when i moved out. When i moved back in with my parents months later, i paid for the broadband myself

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