alt Hacker NewsIf it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
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I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.
1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.
This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information