On using a 56K modem for a week

March 23, 2015 17:16 EST • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé • 2 minute read

You kids do not understand how painful the Internet was. Thankfully somebody tried. Today. And sadly, it only lasted one week.

I can totally understand the will to try the Internet as it once was, the great old days of modern web browsing when Google was not there and the World Wide Web was in its infancy, but the methodology was not perfect. Andrew Spaulding turned off all fast, modern-day communications in order to relive the old mid 90’s Internet. Sadly, after only one week, he stopped because of issues with not getting important work-related text messages. He even stopped using his credit card since most of the terminals now use broadband Internet lines. This was wrong.

He should have restricted his 90s way of life to his immediate computer and entertainment needs and not everything around him. Using a computer with a slowed down connection. OK. Turning off iPhone data plan (only OK if not for work). But the credit card stuff? Come on!

For all your youngster out there, when I came home from high school, I downloaded MP3s and the very first one I got was Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne (I was learning the guitar at that time), circa 1996. One 3.4MB MP3 took 15 minutes to download. Fifteen minutes to wait before listening for the full song! Thankfully, we could listen while the download was going with Winamp and make sure we were not wasting precious minutes of our lives!

Yup, I’m old