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Comment by hibikir | Hacker News Reader

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For one thing, not everybody is in US or other First World country.

But also, yes, I remember 3D accelerators - and how expensive and coveted they were. Few 3D games before 2000 shipped without software 3D rendering support for this reason; I remember Quake 3 (1999) being the first big title like that, and it was one of the big reasons why Unreal Tournament was more popular in my circles back then - you could play it in software mode at 320x240 on fairly meager hardware.

If you had DSL in 1998, you were rich, or at least putting a very high priority on the internet.

ADSL was launched in 1999 in the UK, so you also weren't here.

If you had DSL in 1998, it had nothing to do with whether you were rich or not (anyone getting on the Internet was 'rich') - it had everything to do with how close you were to the nearest node.

Disclaimer: I helped start one of the US' biggest ISP's in this era, and personally installed and handed over multiple DSL configurations to folks living in 'poor' neighbourhoods which were, incidentally, close enough to the NOC to be viable DSL customers.. Plenty of 'poor folks' in downtown LA were able to get DSL, purely by the nature of their vicinity to One Wilshire ..

I think you’re forgetting how fast tech moved in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 1999 that broadband was available in the 8th largest city in the US.

(I remember wanting to dumpster dive the CO because we got a letter from Southwestern Bell saying they were upgrading the equipment to 5ESS in late fall 1998)

Major US cities had bandwidth up the wazoo by the end of the 90's, it just hadn't been properly distributed yet. The poor/rich categorization is unjustified - in fact many poor folks in SoCal were able to leapfrog the Beverly Hills T1 hipsters merely due to the fact that they lived closer to the cheaper NOC's ..

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