In some of my friend groups, I’m the old guy.
Yet, there are some things I miss about the days of dial-up internet.
It wasn’t always that easy, however.
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Plus, we had no phones to handily carry around.
In my case, I was still on dial-up, so YouTube videos were a non-starter for me.
I certainly didn’t want to spend half an hour waiting for a five-minute video to load.
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Anything you wanted to know was at your fingertips.
Images and videos took longer to load because of the bottleneck of the dial-up speed.
A “good” connection meant you could get as much as 10-12 kb/s download speed.
Some long-lasting friendships were forged in the fire of dial-up internet connections.
The more elements the website had, the slower it would load.
This was one of the reasons Google took over as the leading search engine.
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Google was just a single search bar and nothing else, meaning that it loaded at blazing speed.
I even used it as a way of checking if my internet was stable.
If Google didn’t load, the connection was either unstable or disconnected.
That was almost certain to fail in a family that had a single working phone line.
So, what happens to those downloads if you get disconnected?
For the dial-up age, it was a godsend because disconnections didn’t waste your download time.
There was a catch, though.
Knowing which download manager you could trust was an exercise in awareness.
However, if your connection was terrible, you’d know.
Granted, a lot of this is just nostalgia.
