Man, thinking about stuff like that really takes me back. It wasn’t like today, you know? Getting online itself was a whole process.
Dial-Up Days
I remember booting up the old family computer. That beige tower that sounded like a jet engine starting up. Then the modem… that screeching, crackling sound as it connected through the phone line. Nobody could use the phone! If someone picked up the house phone, boom, connection dropped. You had to start all over again.
Searching for anything felt like a treasure hunt. You’d type something into Ask Jeeves or AltaVista, maybe Lycos if you were feeling adventurous. Then you’d wait. And wait.
Loading… Forever
Images loaded line by painful line. You’d see the top of someone’s head appear, then slowly, agonizingly, the rest of the picture would fill in over minutes. Sometimes it wasn’t even what you were looking for. You’d click a link, wait five minutes for the page to load, and it’d be completely unrelated junk or just a broken page. Wild times.
Finding specific pictures, like of wrestlers or movie stars everyone was talking about? It wasn’t easy. You’d end up on weird fan sites, built on Geocities or Angelfire, full of flashing GIFs and terrible background music. Sometimes you’d find something cool, though.
- Saving pictures took forever.
- You had to be careful about viruses, even then.
- Downloads? Forget about downloading anything big unless you wanted to leave the computer on overnight.
I had this whole routine. Get home from school, try to get online before my sister needed the phone. Search for wrestling news, maybe some cheat codes for my PlayStation games. I’d save pictures onto floppy disks – remember those? Had a whole stack of them labeled.
It’s funny, compared to now where everything is instant, high-res, right on your phone. Back then, just finding a grainy picture felt like a major achievement. Different world, really. You appreciated things more when you had to work for them, I guess. Even just a blurry picture loading after ten minutes of that modem screaming.
