Modems....
Dial Up Sounds....
Mmmmmm, the nostalgia is high.
Back in the 90s, modems - or modulators, demodulators - were used to access the internet.
In fact they'd been in commercial use since the 1950s, but were never really an essential
household item until the world wide web, created in 1989 by British Scientist Tim Berners Lee
began to take hold in the mid 1990s.
The Unix based Erwise became the first commonly introduced browser in 1992, which was followed
by a string of more familiar programs, some of which are used to this day... by the odd
person, at least.
We'll cover the history of modems in another episode, but today's task is to connect up
to the internet using dial up and find out whether it's still usable through this outmoded
transmission method.
This is a very special item.
It's my original modem from 1997.
It's actually a TRUST 33.6K model, meaning only 33,600 bits of data can be received per
second.
That's 4.2 Kilobytes of data, or a jpg that looks like this, and even then we're talking
best case scenario.
But still, getting this back then opened up a whole new world of GIFS, dodgy internet
sites and BT Wireplay.
In 1998 the popular 56k modem was released, allowing a 7 kilobyte per second download
speed, but still only 4.2kb for uploads, and for most people, this was the best dial up
speeds they experienced.
So this is what we'll be testing.
The modem I had intended to use, this Intel 537EP variant refused to play ball with Windows
'98 on my Dell Precision 360 Pentium 2 machine.
So a quick trip to Amazon yielded this compact PCI Conexant device.
After fiddling with a few drivers.
Hey presto.
We're back in the 90s.
[90s sequence]
So first thing's first.
We have to connect the modem to the phone socket.
Handily, we don't even have to disrupt my DSL internet connection as modems use the
same analog frequencies as a telephone.
That's what all those ZX Spectrum like hissing and wiring sounds are, and also why we're
limited to such slow speeds.
This does mean however, that like the 90s, you can't use the phone whilst connected.
Oh well, guess I'll have to rely on my mobile.... if anyone rings, that is.
[I'm so lonely]
As you can imagine, Dial up providers of the past have long gone, so we'll be using the
Freeola service for our needs.
Yes, there are still dial up providers available, for the most rural of locations, and they
operate on a pay as you go method, billed to your phone bill.
This is much like providers such as X-Stream back in the 90s, although you now pay 2p per
minute rather than the 10p per minute which my parents discovered to their horror back
in 1997.
A generic user name does the deed and we are in.
So, let's go surfing!
The outdated browsers compatible with Windows '98 don't really allow us to load up modern
sites, but with the use of KernelEx we can trick the 11.64 version of Opera browser into
believing it's running on an XP machine and achieve a fairly coherent level of browsing.
So first up, here's the speed test I conducted using broadband.
My connection is roughly 40 Mega Bits per second, and this holds true on my Windows
10 machine.
However this setup seems to bottle neck it to 2.8 Mega bits.
But matter not, this will provide us with a reasonable measuring base.
Using dial-up...
Well...
It takes a while.
At first I didn't think it would even load the test, but it does, and after it finishes,
it reports a download speed of 0.
An upload of 0 and one hell of a ping time.
So how about a timed test?
A simple site like MSN.com loads in just under 5 seconds, which seems reasonable for a 350kb
per second connection.
Using dial up... well, we get the thoroughly mawkish little computer icon in the task bar,
and a considerable wait.
Not only does this mean we have an image of Brad Pitt almost baring his nips on our screen
for a good while.
It also means we have to wait just over 2 minutes and 50 seconds for all the page elements
to load.
Now, we actually managed to connect to Freeola at 45,333 bits per second, or roughly 5.6kb
per second.
Which is 62 times slower than our broadband connection, but the page only loaded 34 times
slower.
So we're doing pretty well based on pure transmission speed.
Of course we're not factoring in translation speed, rendering, caching, and so forth.
So, this feels about right, as you may have predicted.
Let's try a more complicated site, like BBC.co.uk
So here's our Broadband connection, and it clocks in at just over 10 seconds.
About double MSN's time.
From that you could ascertain that loading the same page on dial up should take just
under 6 minutes.
Now, we could sit here musing on the slow motion loading we're witnessing, with unformatted
text loading first, followed by the layout and formatting afterwards.
Or we could just skim over some headlines about dinners and TERROR....
But, really.
Truth be told.
I abandoned the BBC site at this stage, before 5 minutes was even up.
Because it's evident that using dial-up in this day and age, is just ridiculous.
For better or worse, the internet is no longer a lean collection of lightweight images, 4
frame animations and text.
It's now a monstrous place of massive images, complex formatting and excessive bandwidth.
Even my own website, which loaded fine on Broadband, was just filled with such disdain
for dial-up that my server just gave up sending data, and the site failed to load at all.
Opera even tried to help out at one point by switching it's Turbo mode on.
This streamlines websites down to their bones, leaving sites such as Youtube looking like
this.
But helpful as it may be if you're really out in the stix, this isn't really a workable
situation.
Now, you might ask, other than for nostalgia, why didn't I just conduct this experiment
on my Windows 10 machine.
Well, as it happens, I gave it a whirl.
You can pick up 56k USB modems like this one cheap enough, and establishing a dial-up connection
under Windows 10 is a simpler task than it ever was.. but modern browsers were simply
not happy with the arrangement.
Sure, I could have tweaked the settings to improve loading, but it's still like trying
to wedge a train into pipe, even after turning off all the applications which are constantly
talking across the net in this day and age.
One thing that has remained fairly consistent however, is Google.
It worked on my Nokia WAP experiment, and it's simple interface means loading is fairly
quick, even under dial up.
But really, for the true experience, you need to head on over to the Way back machine and
load up a proper search engine.
Like Alta Vista.
Due to the Way Back Machine overhead, even this takes a while, but it's worth it, just
for that ram packed, 90s layout alone.
Ahhh, good times Alta Vista.
Good times indeed.
Now where are the 90s cat animations....