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Comment by computerslol | Hacker News Reader

This post makes me happy :).

  and 0.gif (fewer characters!) bring back memories. What I miss most was the hacky tricks you'd have to put together to get load times down on dialup. Carefully controlling the order in which things rendered. Early DHTML. Slicing layouts so that as much as humanly possible the images repeated. Tables tables tables. IFrames that talked to each other. The javascript that converted <div>s to <layers> for netscape.

In those days I was certain there would be a complete replacement for HTML/JavaScript/CSS that would take over. Flash came and went. Silverlight was a lovely attempt. We just kept layering lipstick on our pig :).

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Keeping load times down on dialup.

last month I hit my usage cap and was capped to 256k downstream. 256k. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING SIX! FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN DIALUP! I thought that's fine I can cope.

The internet is highly broken at 256k. Pages basically don't ever completely load. You end up having to cancel. You end up turning off images, turning off javascript.

I can't imagine what the web is like at 56k now. Completely fucking un-functional I would imagine.

Pretty much. About 5 years ago I brought my work laptop on vacation where there was only a phone line. No sweat, my laptop still had a 56k modem, and I started on a 1200 baud modem back in the day, so I was willing to be patient, or so I thought.

Once I connected it took almost 2 hours just to start Outlook.

haha, yeah, same I started out on BBS's with a 1200 baud modem and that required serious patience (better than my grand father who had a 300 bps acoustic coupler). We moved interstate and I had no ADSL for a week. I set up a modem, and it had been _years_ since I used one. I forgot you had to enable error correction in the init string (modem init string, remember those!), and so the connection was so bad I couldn't even get a page to load.

Thankfully there's mobile tethering/hot-spotting now

That sucks dude :(. Yeah, people like you are overlooked. You should call customer support for the sites you use most often and complain. Low bandwidth users are a forgotten demographic.

I'm sorry dude :(. You are part of a forgotten demographic.

Oh God yes - remember having to use progressive JPEG's? Now some sites have full screen video in the background!

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