VIDEO While working from home in 2020,
Dr. Gough Lui decided to recapture the full sensory experience of dial-up internet from the 1990s. He then visited modern websites using Windows 98 hardware.
A video where I demonstrate the late 1990s dial-up experience using near period-accurate hardware, connecting to modern websites using outdated browsers over a 31.2kbit/s dial-up connection. Gui notes that at this point, all of us take internet accessibility for granted. Yet, it was only 25 years ago that the process was a bit more onerous.
The internet has become a vital part of our everyday lives, but the way we experience it now through broadband high-speed connections is not the way it was in my childhood. Back in the late 90’s to early 2000s, I was dialing up from my Pentium 133MHz non-MMX machine equipped with 48MB of RAM running Windows 98SE (and later, Windows 2000 Professional). This experience was in itself, reflective of the fact that the “always-on” internet was not considered a necessity or normality – back then, “ttyt” short for “talk to you tomorrow” was a thing.
Michael Feeney had conducted
a similar experiment with a Mac OS 9 .
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