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Random things this post made me appreciate:

Broadband - especially 1+Gbps connections (we are spoiled and I love it!)

Latency that can be measured in milliseconds per packet around the world, not seconds or minutes per character.

Multitasking not just locally, but across a network

Streaming video when I remember a 320x240 image taking FOREVER to download

Downloads that actually complete and don't corrupt most of the time.

Stateless connections that are easy to restart if something does go wrong

And so much more.

Downloading files used to be such a situation. Remember GetRight?

Sadly I don't remember GetRight had to google it.

That said I remember how happy I was with Z-Modem when it came out.

Before I had an error correcting modem with lots of line-noise I thought Z-Modem with it's built in error correction, ability to resume an interrupted download, and even auto-downloading (not having to tell my terminal to download) felt like magic!

Do you remember the people who thought the CD ROM drive of a computer was actually a cup holder?

I wouldn’t have thought that there were many people using computers who weren’t already familiar with audio CDs. While most portable players were top-loading, I remember the majority of home stereos having the slide-out tray. I would have thought anyone using computers at the time would also have been familiar with home stereo/hi-fi systems (even if they didn’t own one).

I agree. The cup-holder thing was a joke, not a real claim.

Ah OK. I’ve come across some strange beliefs about computers and other technology so it’s not completely implausible. Poe's law strikes again.

Hey, that's not to say that NOBODY believed this. Back in the day I was in a programming class with a bunch of non-tech people (at the Accenture training center).

In those days you could impersonate anyone with the Novell networks' "net send" command, because you could enter the originating user ID by hand. So I would find out the number of one of my classmates' workstations and send a message from the admin: "Keyboard unbalanced. Please adjust."

Sure enough, I look over and she's quizzically lifting her keyboard and tilting it around.

I do.

But it was about 30 years later when I discovered that "cup holders" were a real thing that are a standard fixture on American cars.

European cars are tiny things by comparison and there isn't room to drink while driving, and we didn't have drive-through food or drink places in the 20th century, either. Also, they are all manual gearshift, so your hand is too busy to drink.

Some cars have a recess by the gear stick for a bottle or a can of soft drink, but most people use it for small items like garage door zappers or coins for meters instead.

Thus is was about 2015 or 2020 when I first saw a picture of a pop-out cup holder and realised that this was a Thing, a Thing that Americans would recognise, and that optical drive trays do look similar.

Nobody ever bothered to explain that, because Americans tend to assume that the whole world is like America.

A/S/L "Dox yourself please, and I might even hit on you as a bonus"

Random people would just message you this out of the blue. When I was about 10 or 11 some girl did this and we figured out we lived two hours away from each other. We ended up talking and kept in touch for years. Eventually our family’s had planned a vacation to the same city at the same time and we met up in person finally and had a good time. It never turned into a relationship but we kept in touch until I was in my early twenties. It just seemed like a different world compared to the social networking of today. Things were more innocent and there was a lot more inherit trust between people online.

Maybe if people didn't just spam 16/F/Cali whether it was true or not lol

I remember being in Yahoo chat rooms and my 11 year old logic was "I should lie and say I'm older...13 is old enough to be 'not a kid' right?"

> I was using still using a 300 baud modem with my C=64 when Q-Link launched.

Wow, that brought back memories for me. Quantum Link was my first "online" experience, and the cost made it very much a "get in, get it done, and get out" kind of experience, but Grolier's Online Encyclopedia helped me with many reports and papers in elementary school.

Once I moved to PC and dial-up BBS, it was all over for Quantum Link.