Last time the sister and her family visited, and the brother in law brought his computer, the joke was just how long it takes for the modem to connect. This time it was the cousins downloading music.
shareJust wait until the kids discover chat rooms... and Jessica sees the next AOL bill. :)
shareIt was waiting to load a picture. Was downloading music even possible in 1996?
shareI assumed music because of the rap/grunge/Pearl Jam thing - I was typing my other post about subtitles so maybe someone could use it before the show ended! After I finished that I saw and heard one more subtitle with my full attention.
I didn't get internet access until 1997! But I don't know when downloading music started - was "napster" the start of it, or just the start of free downloading?
Napster made it easy and popular but wasn't the beginning.
Before Napster I used to download music through FTP sites found through a site called AudioGalaxy.
Even before that there were also AOL warez chat rooms which sometimes had music.
Totally forgot about audio galaxy!
(was that the 'legit' one that was based in Russia?$
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So the Huang family had the Internet way back in 1996? Aren't the parents suppose to be dollar tree store level cheap? Having the internet in your home in 1996 was considered a luxury.
In 1996, the only kids I knew who had the Internet were the ones who had parents who spoiled their children.
It's the sister's family, they have lugged a desktop system from DC both times they have visited. They have been depicted as show-offs and social climbers. The first time they were trying to pretend that they were well-off, until O.J. showed up and reposessed the brother in law's sports car.
shareYou can access internet via a phone line in 1993
Classics are names that everyone heard, yet most have never seen!!
Back then, dial up internet was $20 a month. Slow as heck though. But not expensive. And yes, I still remember having to disconnect from the dial up so someone could use the phone. It was hilarious.
sharein 1998 I could download a 4 Mb mp3 song for 15 minutes.
I've only downloaded music a few times, but I was downloading a book that the author had put on a website at his university, each page was a JPEG scan about 1MB each (the quality setting had to be high for small text) and there were almost 700 pages. He had made a simple website with each book page on a separate web page with buttons to go forward and backward, maybe a jump to a page, so you could read it online. There were probably utilities (apps!) to download the whole website but I was just downloading one page at a time which took several minutes. I got the chapters I particularly wanted but I hoped to get the whole thing. In time my dial-up connection quit - the dialer program that ran first, just put up a fatal error one day. I was thinking about whether to get high speed internet which was pretty common by then (maybe 2010?!!!) but just lived without internet until last December when I got this smartphone. One of the first things I did was look for that book. The author works for Microsoft now and the same page-by-page website is there, but also a PDF that downloaded in a few minutes - no more than ten minutes, anyway - between the compression of the PDF and the speed of my connection. Even after I use up my fast data in a month, the speed is supposed to be 128 kilobits per second, which is about three times faster than I ever got with dial-up (the fastest I ever got with my 56k modem was 43k.)
lol, your post is from 2015 with 128 kilobits per second? that is supposed to be fast? If you got google fiber you would have a heart attack.
shareThat's what my cellular service provider says the speed is after I use up my fast data, until the start of the next month. I've noticed some providers say, in the fine print of their ads, that they go to "2G" speed after the fast data is used up. Since I only had dialup years ago and then had no internet for several years, and have never had wired broadband service, my 4G service is very fast to me, and the slow data for the rest of the month is tolerable!
shareI guess your generation is not addicted to the internet as we are. LOL. but regarding your setup. you know that cellular service data is almost 20 times more expensive than regular wired bandwidth right?
Also how are you watching this show? with your cellphone data?
Internet these days have become such a necessity that governments even mandate it as a right.
That is why your local library probably has a computer with internet access.
I've used the internet at the library but every time I go there, I have to fill out a new form for a new library card because they keep changing the rules governing who is allowed to use the public library!
As for governments mandating it as a right - big deal. Governments are only interested in knowing where people are and what they are doing.
I watch broadcast TV with an antenna. I don't pay anything for the channels I can get this way. I'm lucky to live in an area where there are a lot of broadcast stations with strong signals. I like being able to watch TV without someone knowing exactly what I'm watching, and when.
I only got this smartphone because my landline monthly phone service was going up about $5 a year and the cost of service for a smartphone (that I saw advertised on broadcast TV!) was less. So this is primarily my telephone and the internet service is a bonus, for less money than I was paying just for the phone. As I said in my earlier post, I hadn't had internet service for several years and I was somehow surviving, and observing the increasing number of things you can't do without the internet.
I know I can get just wired internet service at home and then kludge a phone connection onto it for very little more, but I prefer to have a dedicated phone connection. Also with a smartphone, I can carry it around with me if I want to, although I don't do that much, since I depend on this one device for my phone service. As for the speed, when it's fast it's fast and when it's slow it's tolerable. I used up my fast data for the month this morning. Yesterday I was watching some YouTubes, today I can't (except a little at a time - once I spent an hour watching a nine minute video) and today I can look at the same websites I was looking at yesterday, they just load a lot slower.
did you know that now these days, you can have VOIP phone service through your internet line?
did you know that you can make cellphone calls through the internet?
anyways, internet is a tool that makes our life easier, it has given us more choice, where communication has improved = skype/video chat.
I said in my post that I know I can get a telephone connection through an internet connection. I choose not to. I prefer the type of communications capabilities that I have with my smartphone.
Or in the words of your second message to me, I am not addicted to the internet as you are.
The MP3 specifications were released in 1993. MP3 files started to spread on the Internet in the second half of the '90s.
share[deleted]
You mean the RAM?
The Monitor always rested on the RAM.
The floppy floppy disc drive was under the keyboard.
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Forget everything you just read, and go back to sleep.
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The older desktops used to use those 6in. really floppy floppy disks. The drives were under the monitor. The older floppies were much too big to fit anywhere else. There was so little space on the hard drives inside that you had to load your programs from the big floppies using DOS commands. Every time you wanted to use your spreadsheet, or write a letter. And leave it there; a notch made it Read Only.
They were literally Floppy - you could fold them in half quite easily. Stored in paper envelopes, they were easily dirtied and smudged. Read errors were common; bye-bye back up!
Want to save your results? Take out your program disk and put in you data disk. The really fancy desktops had two floppy drives ( A & B ) so you didn't have to remove the Program disk and put in the Data disk.
It wasn't until some years later that internal hard drives were cheaper and "bigger" (held more) so you could store Program Software internally. The newer, 4 inch "floppies" held more info than their older cousins and were small enough to slide into the keyboard. We called them "discettes" for a while.
They also held the original program code, but blank 4 in. floppies were mainly used for back-up and storage. They were enclosed in plastic and didn't bend like the old ones, so read errors went way down.
Plus you could put a few in your pocket and share your data with the rest of the office. Sneaker-Net was born!
(Sorry, I didn't mean to write a Wiki article about floppies on a TV Show Page. I originally started out by saying "N'yuh-uh!")
You Fill Me with Inertia.
Dialup dominated many of our lives and has more than one potential for humor and absurdity (though it was a miracle back then, of course).
-silly sound
-slowness
-keeps everyone else from using the phone//other peoples' phone use keeps you from getting online.
-keeps everyone else from using the phone
That's funny. They had to remind people not to keep trying to use a busy line. It slows down the pizza ordering process! :)
But yea, you had to either keep track of who was using the phone lines or buy another one for the computer.