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Comment by dobermanz | Hacker News Reader

Its 1996 - AOHell is loading, Aphex Twin blasts over 28.8, cordless phones hidden, a pizza is on the way…

AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.

I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.

I was gonna say, we absolutely had streaming music. Did it suck? Yes, but it was novel, so it was acceptable. I had a 33.6 connection that my ISP eventually upgraded to full 56K, which I discovered by noticing that the dial-up handshake sounded different.

Man… I sound old.

You’ve unlocked a memory for me! I had that same experience when I heard a different series of squeals than normal only to realise the modem had negotiated something faster than 31.2!

I turned my squeals off. Got a phone bill. Turned on the sqeals. Dialler.exe was calling the Seychelles. That was back in the days when my telecom let me off the bill (7* my monthly income at the time) because 'You have a virus".

Reminds me of a time that on the weekends my parents would drive to my grandads who had a computer. My grandad was a television screen writer and I had discovered Habbo Hotel, so win win.

Of course hormones being all the rage at 17, I decided to look at porn and printed it out so I could show it around at school. What I had done was downloaded a premium rate dialler that ended costing him around £100 back in 2003.

I had gone downstairs and forgotten to disconnect. He's passed now but sorry Grandad for the phone bill. I had never realised what I had done until many years later.

Still, I was one of the cooler kids in school for having a HP DeskJet printed crumpled piece of paper of a naked lady.

in 2003?

Yeah, I was 16. Dial-up was still primarily the internet, 512kb broadband in the UK didn't really hit until 2007/8. The best you had was 128k ISDN.

I'm taking the downvote in stride, but 14.4 and 28.8 RealAudio streaming seems like it lasted all of 3 months and then people had napster and were pulling 96k mp3s.

I had AudioGalaxy before Napster, and preferred higher bitrates (192 KBPS CBR, until VBR took off), but yes - RealAudio didn’t have that long of a lifetime in comparison.

I used to listen to Art Bell on the Coast to Coast RealAudio stream - from the UK!

I think it was before "RealVideo" so it was still just "RealAudio" and not "RealPlayer". Or something like that.

> no one was streaming music on 28.8.

In 2000-ish I was streaming video on 28.8 - not very good video, but video nonetheless.

Also, I'm pretty sure "28.8 Aphex Twin" was more a reference to this sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-DaFZgCcvA

more like over 88.1

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