Them days of growing up, downloading mp3's at 3.35 kb/s transfer speeds on dial up and going "Fuck yeah this is the high life, no getting better than this" lol.
I remember downloading a song on P2P downloaders taking hours or sometimes even a whole day. Now I can download a Blu Ray rip of a 1080p movie in less than 10 minutes.
I still remember my love/hate relationship with NetZero as a child. Wouldn't have been able to surf as much without their free service. In the early days I was able to connect to the internet, then kill the process that was serving up that annoying ad banner along the bottom. I felt like a genius putting it to the man!
This is me with my parents. When a webpage takes a moment to load, they'll look at me and be like, why isn't this loading?
And then I'll be like, bruh, back in the day, I had to stop using the internet, because you wanted to make a phone call. You'll survive waiting a goddamn femtosecond longer.
56K was my intro to the internet. Not as ancient, but pretty close. Now I have gigabit, so instead of waiting for a week, only donwloading at night, now I can get a movie in minutes. What a world to live in.
Dsl wasn't offered in my area until 2012 ish. Up till then I was using crappy 3g wireless dongles or my last 56k modem which had built in ethernet ports (still have that modem just in case). I feel this meme.
I started my online journey on a bleeding edge (and very expensive) 28.8k modem. I still remember the amazing feeling of speed migrating to 33.6k and eventually 56k. We were semi-rural so while the eventual availability of DSL was game changing, our lines were so bad it was less reliable that dial-up. If it rained we had no internet whatsoever.
So glad things have moved on significantly since then.
My crappy basement apartment with my two older brothers and 3 separate phone lines just for playing Ultima Online, then Everquesst.
I missed a phone interview with Sony Online Entertainment, because I was too busy playing Asheron's Call to get off the dial-up connection. Having an unlimited access plan through my work really was bad. Especially when my job blocked every website based on my job searches because they wanted me to stay working the support line graveyard shift.
@ParanoidPizzas, who has never had the joy of downloading a game with a 56k modem and receiving a phone call in the middle of it, has not had a real internet experience
I remember the fear any time something was greater than 1MB. My first download on any new computer was always a download manager to try and avoid the constant drop-outs and restarts.