Technology

Somewhere in the mid 1990s, my company provided ISDN so I could work from home

2009 was when my family switched from dialup to wifi and all of a sudden my old laptop had access to internet.

We switched to cable around 2008.

2008 I think.

2003. Went from 56K to 3Mbps cable. It was mind-blowingly fast at the time.

But then in 2004 my parents had to go back to dialup for awhile to save money, which was brutal. Especially since I would video chat with my GF often and download all sorts of stuff from KaZaA. Have you ever tried to do a video call on dialup? 0.1-0.5 FPS and compressed so badly that it's hard to make out even basic facial features. It's a miracle that it worked at all.

I used to live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. And I believe we had dial up until 2010. I specifically remember our first Wi-Fi router being an 802.11G Belkin 54G router. And our first high-speed internet was 1.5mbps fiber. We upgraded from 1.5mbps to 3mbps and then to 7mbps by the time I moved out. Because that was my childhood home. I can also remember that at that time, I thought our school internet was super fast. And yet we were sharing a T1 line for the entire school. But it was still way faster than the dial up I had at home.

(/s)

1998 I moved to cable modem in Argentina. Around that time also moved to optical mouse Microsoft IntelliMouse and 3dfx video card. In 2008 I got my first SSD. I think those thing were one of the most shocking technologies I experienced.

I want to say it was about 2005 or 2006.

My first "broadband" was Hughes satellite internet, due to living in a rural location. It was hot garbage, but it was better than dialup.

The speeds were Ok (for me), but the data cap (applied daily) was draconian. I don't recall the specific amount but it basically made it impossible to stream video in any capacity.

There was a 3-hour period from midnight to 3am every night where the cap didn't count. That effectively became internet time because it was unusable otherwise.

I got cable in 2010.

I think 2008 or so.

2001. Was 19 still living at home when my Dad switched us to something called "@home" broadband, which became Comcast a couple years later. I do remember being blown away by seeing images load almost instantly on a web page.

That was also the last year I remember using Netscape Navigator as a daily driver. It was IE for the next four years until I switched to Firefox, and have been using that ever since. Yes, IE blows, but Navigator was starting to become a bloated mess as it started to suffer from feature creep trying to win people back.

Once my mam got sick of missing phonecalls in the evening. Early noughties I think.

I think our household was the first in my primary school class to get broadband, which I think was the late 90s. It was still measured in kbps (like 250-500 or so?), but it didn’t cost more to be online permanently. (ADSL).

I am not 100% sure on the exact year, but some time in the mid, possibly late, 2000s is when I think my family ditched it.

All I know is I have memories of it being somewhere around 2011-12 and not wanting to have the router moved out of my grandma's room because mine was directly below hers, which narrows it down to probably before 2010. Didn't live outside society, either.

About 4 hours ago.

99/2000ish i suspect? It was an Optus@Home cable connection when "netstats" was still used. It was sold as an "unlimited" plan, but really it was 10x the average download of your node.

For us, it really was unlimited because we were the only people on our node for ages. As more people connected, we started hitting the limit pretty regular.

You could also spy on your net neighbours usage because the cable modem logging (available via telnet and a default username and password) showed every connection on your node. Not sure of the technical side of this - I think because cable was in a daisy chain from node to properties and back?

Because we were early adopters, sending +++ATH0 in ping packets was super effective too heh.

2000, when the dial up service I was using announced they were shutting down.

I lucky enough to get my first DSL line in 1997.

Was only paying for 128Kbps down but this was before they actually had any throttling in place, and I was close enough to the DLAM to get 1Mbit down. It was mind-blowing at a time when a 1.44Mbps T1 line was $1000+/month pipe dream!

I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren't even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).

Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota...

August 2001, I moved from Berks County PA, where I was a hundred feet or so too far from getting DSL, to central Maryland where there was Comcast cable already in my apartment.

I'd say 1999, first DSL was only 1.1M

Got DSL in like 2003? I remember some friends with 128 ISDN back in like 1998, that was mind blowing to me, not having to dial in.

2008. It took a while to be affordable here.