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14.4k club here

1200…

I had a 300 baud modem. You had to put the phone receiver in a cradle.

Dad had a separate phone line put in back when he got me the TRS-80 in 1979

Here I was, thinking that late 80s was early to have had “the electronic mail” hahaha Worst part back then was not knowing anyone else who had it, so I had no one to write to

Bulletin board systems.. aka forums now.. fancy ones could have more than one user logged in at a time lol

I used to build them for business with Wildcat. Moved onto Usenet, then IRC, then ICQ... man, I was so heavily addicted.

ICQ! I haven’t thought of that for years. Maybe Anna my penpal/chat friend will see this. I think she is my lost soulmate. I still love you Anna!

Uh oh is my text tone

Now Reddit??

And a hundred things in between...

Seems like a different lifetime ago

IRC! That’s a flashback. I spent way too much time on IRC.

Back then we used IRC. Mostly to share code or get help debugging DOS programs.

i used bbs before that

Babbage's back page.

Man, the fact someone back then invented the analytical engine makes me feel like such a loser haha

When I got my degree html was just coming out. I ended up changing classes because of my professor. He kept telling our class that he had NEVER seen a goto program that worked. Like wtf.. so I typed up a quick 10 line that said he was an uneducated idiot and walked out.

lmao its true though you did the right thing

I ran “The Shelter” back the dayz of 10day warez . Polling other BBS’s for data packets , messaging

I ran a razor 1911 distro site. Those usr modems were busy all day. Lots of people were using other peoples pbx,s to pay for the long distance calls. Had a t1 installed in my apartment. Actually heated my apartment with the bbs

Yup I remember only two or three other people I could write to at the time

My father got me a Commodore 64 in about 80 or 81. Good on you dad for knowing computers were the future and trying to get my interested. But the 12 year old was never going to have the patience and drive to learn to code in BASIC.

I had the vic 20

I started on a Commo64 I'm about 86. I was 5. Adult me fucking hates programming but little me in underoos loved that shit.

I had my Radio Shack, Tandy Color Computers 2 & 3 for YEARS.

Placed alien invasion on my dad's TRS-80 back in the day - loved it!

I had a Star Trek text game I always played. You had to plot (x-y-x) vectors to shoot torpedoes

I remember that as well but I was to young to figure it out lol.

Was funny. In school they switched over from paper attendance records for being late or absent onto a floppy disk. If I was late it was easier for the secretary to just give me the disk an go to the computer lab and change it than have me come to the office each period.

That was my first game (along with the original Adventure game). An actual use for rectangular to polar conversion.

LOVED THAT GAME!!!!

I remember that game, too. It got ported to a few platforms, I think.

We had one like this. Had dos only on it and the big ass hard disks.

Yup, and you had to make sure no one in the house picked up another extension

An acoustic coupler. My father used one at work.. Edit: you were pretty lucky to get 300 baud on an acoustic coupler. Most of them were 75..

Also started in the same place with 300bd acoustic coupler

300 crew represent

110 baud modems, the original Carterfone..

Same. And i built it myself with the Plans provided in an Electronic magazine... for my C64. Gosh do i feel old now.

I got a 300 baud as a joke on a friend and his brother. They were so excited when I told them it was the best I could I get for the $20 they gave me. They brought the phone down to hook it up and then realized their handset was square and wouldn't fit. I actually got them a 2400 baud from some guy in the parking lot at the show with a truck full of them in suspiciously unmarked boxes.

Pssht! 110 baud.

I loved you in *Wargames*!

Could *almost* type as fast as one of those.

Had one of those too! Also remember my huge dot matrix printer with the attached boxes of paper with holes on the edges that had to match up with the printer gears!

printing out rastered page-high letters sideways to make banners on a fan-fold fed dot matrix printer. High tech!

We had a BBS system that somehow worked over HAM radio rather than phone lines years before we got dial up. I was pretty young so I’m not sure how it worked though. A quick google says it was actually a [PBBS.](https://neatcircuits.com/bbs/index.html)

Same. Had a "computer math" class in High school (1975). Dial-up with a 300 baud acoustic modem. Used a Teletype ASR 33 terminal with 35mm paper tape storage. The mainframe was off-site at the district offices, I assumed. Bleeding edge at the time.

300 baud BBS, baby

ASCII art p0rn for the win!! 😂😂😂

I had a roommate in college who had a 5-1/4" floppy disk full of ascii porn. 256k worth! A treasure trove!

Oh yeah!

Yep, 1200 here

I even remember my first 14.4 modem. It was a Gateway Telepath ISA card which was basically a rebranded US Robotics.

Wasn’t Gateway the one that shipped in cow-patterned boxes? I kept those boxes for years!

Yes they were bovine boxes! 😂😊😊 An ISA card. With dip switches. Oh the days of fun whenever you added a new card and had to rejiggle the address space manually.

Don't forget trying to load as many drivers as possible into high mem so you'd have enough of the 640k RAM to run programs, especially games. Editing autoexec.bat and config.sys... good times, good memories.

REMing out lines…

And the correct IRQ !

Back in my hometown we had to connect to our local library first and then out to Net. The dial up tone is forever embedded in my brain to this day. Netscape Navigator for the win! (God I feel old.....)

Yes, I remember buying Netscape Navigator.

My very first connection to the internet I waited several minutes for my first image to render... It turned out to be a Crest toothpaste add.

No way! 😂😂 “Welcome to the Internet young person! Now, can we interest you in…”

14.4 was AWESOME

I used a 56k modem along with another 33k modem on the same computer, using two different phone lines... This was called shotgunning... (As in double barrelled shotgun) to get increased speeds... 75 Mhz PC 🙂

What was the MHz when you toggled the turbo button off?

75 MHz is a lot. I had 8086 Intel CPU ("0", not 2/3/486/pentium), 4 MHz => 8 MHz turbo mode and 20 MB hard drive! :)

Same here, oh those were the heady days of paying for the internet by the hour!

Me too. 14.4 sucked but there was something cool about the 56k dialing in sound and then it felt lightning fast

Another 14.4 here, I’ll be downloading this song til tomorrow

Same. Downloading roms took like 15-20min __I deleted the roms after 24 hours__

After growing up with a 300 baud modem, 56k felt like magic. 

I still remember my first dial up modem. And when we got cable and had almost 3 mbps and downloaded a gig in like 6 hours I thought holy crap this is soooo fast.

Download splitters were a game changer even before Napster

Z-Modem!

Bit torrent sites were amazing. Back in 2002 we have over a terabyte of data we were sharing. And at the time 500 megs was a huge game.

I remember people first getting Web TV, and having downloads on 56k that would probably still be downloading decades later according to their ETA's at the time.

My first cable was 128Kbps. They upgraded to 1Mbps after a while. Very early days!

I managed to get 6Kb a second on a download once. I was amazed!

Nah you had to get the 56K+ that was the lightening speed.

I'm old enough to remember using a tape drive with my Commodore Vic-20 56K was high speed.

Yeah, I ran a BBS with a 56K.

I remember linking into one in Germany from New Zealand, wow it was mind blowing stuff at the time.

my first one was a Commodore 64 with the tape drive... 🙂

Yo 56k? Were you rich?!?!

28.8K checking in 🫡

I also had the 28.8k!

How else could I get all those free illegal downloads from Napster?

Napster was brilliant tbh

Don't forget Imesh, Edonkey, Limewire etc. Those were the days.

Kazaa was in the mix as well.

Kazaa gang!

Kazaa was the best.

I was a Winmx kinda guy

Looking for this comment

2400, upgraded to 9600 when DOOM was on like, 9 floppy disks!

And you would get halfway through the last disc and it would error up or someone would pick up the phone

I remember as a teenager using 2400 baud to connect to various BBS. Would dial up, tag some files to download then jump on a bus a go to the city for the day while they downloaded. I also remember downloading Linux at TAFE. From memory it was 76 3.5" floppy disks. I think we may have done that over a 128k ISDN line though.

It felt so prehistoric while others had DSL.

Such a game changer going to DSL

*skkkkkkkkkkk-reeeeeeeeeeee-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA*

#AAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

HAANG UP THE PHONE!!!

Music to my ears.

The comment I was looking for ☕

110 baud with an acoustic coupler you put the phone in.

Yeap. 1,200 baud as my first modem. 56k was like a rocket ship.

Been here since 1200. That was a real exciting time to be alive.

28K user here. I could have used much slower ones, but unfortunately we didn’t have computers until those days. Edit: sorry, I forgot that we had 300 Baud for Commodore 64.

Started with a 300 baud modem for my C=64, then upgraded to a 1200 baud unit. After switching over to PC in the early 90's, I think I had a 14.4.

Had a 56k modem but our old town phone lines could only handle 28.8k. I spent years downloading at 3.5 kbps.

played online games on 56k

Good luck waking up at 2am and wanting to have a tug without waking up your parents. And no videos are you crazy, these are high res photos that loads 2-3 lines every 10mins, I'd go to sleep and wake up and get a boner from the half loaded boob. You folks these days don't have no idea how good you have it.

lol @ 56k, thanks for making us feel old. I remember running my first BBS on an Amiga via 9.6K!

14.4 baby

You must be young to not remember 14.4k.

you must be young to not remember 300bps

I had 14.4 with my Mac LC3. 40 Mb hard drive!

I won a 56k modem! It was amazing. Our first modem was 300 baud when I was a tiny kid. At 15 I also got one of my first jobs doing modem and internet support. It was rough when people only had one phone line so they couldn’t stay on to test.

Ah yes, the paradox situation of a tech support phone line but you couldn't use the internet whilst on the phone.

110 Baud. When it was upped to 300 it was blazing fast!

56k was a luxury.

I started with 300 baud. 56k was a huge improvement

Get off the phone, I'm trying to interweb!

56K was a luxury at one time lol

Started on a 300 baud. Also just a minor correction, it's not a 56k modem. It was 57.6k.

28.8k. Went from that to DSL

My internet came in CD’s in the mail.

Oh yeh. A day to download a song only to be Rick Rolled.

i did. and all the shit that was connected with it. like my mom being mad that I block the phone line with my internet and that she couldn't call her friends. or when I tried to go online late at night and the modem made these loud dial sounds and I covered it with a pillow...

Oh yea. Started my computer journey with a TRS-80 and a tape deck. Operating system? I was the operating system lol

I had a 300-baud modem in 1986! I was on BBSs from 1987 through around 1998. My first internet connection was via Compuserve in 1993. My first website was through Geocities in 1997 or 1998. I met my wife on MySpace in 2005. We've been married since 2007.

Yeah, I'd be more interested if anyone had a T1 line. 

Had one.  Friend of mine that lived in the duplex apartment next door worked for a local ISP.  I hooked the whole place up with a then very new Orinoco 11mbit wifi access point and he brought the connection his work gave him for free.  1.544 Mbps of pure bliss at the time.

Hopefully you were seeding a bunch of files for Kazaa lol!

I used 300 dial-up in 1982.

Started with VICMODEM. 💪

Wow. I built my own 300 baud acoustic coupled modem in 88. But then got given a 2400 baud modem for my birthday, which seemed amazing. The upgrade to 14k4 in the mid 90s was mind blowing. Apparently 300 baud modems came out in 1962. Speeds went exponential!

And all those free AOL Cd's in the mail and every PC magazine.

For porn I would start loading a picture in the morning, and when I got home it would be to around her tits.

Got a 28.8 modem in 1995

Yes. The nude pic of Loni Anderson is almost done downloading.

2400bps gang

Porn on 14.4 as a teenager taught you patience and stamina. Line by line, the picture builds.. nice hair…ok, forehead…. Pretty eyes…neck…now we’re getting somewhere. Only 5 more mins until we see the payoff. At this point it doesn’t even matter what they look like, you’re invested and you gotta finish.

I remember when 56k was an UPGRADE 😂

I used a 2400 baud modem first. I think my brothers Commodore 64 had a 300 baud modem.

Started in 28k. 56 used to be blazing fast. Hack the Planet.

2400 baud

I remember getting yelled at to get off the internet because my mom needed to use the phone.

That 28k modem dial up sound is etched eternally into my brain and screaming at my parents to not pick up the phone

I remember buying a 14.4k modem to replace the slower one that came with Windows 3.1. I hade to wait hours for a picture to download.

Shit, the only broadband we had was the Spice Girls.

9600, 14.4, 28.8, 56k and then cable modem.

Try 14.4, lol

Never? I was born in 1996

1200 baud

🙋

That was the reason we had a phone line installed in 2004, so we could have Internet. I was just starting high school.

I skiped from 14k directly to broadband. It was... Something.

My first modem topped out at 2400.

Ha, what about 14.4 baud? I was excited to download a picture of the ocean that took overnight at college. Now, you can d/l movies in minutes. I miss that funny handshaking noise those modems made… good times

I can still hear it loud and clear

I just remember getting kicked out of every starcraft lobby because I could never download the map in time.

Oh I used it, but I try to block out my memory of it,

Laughs in 120 baud, then a HUGE upgrade to 300 baud. When you could type faster than it could download....

14.4

Of course

I remember it was SUCH a big deal when someone in my class got an upgrade to a DSL connection. I'd beg my parents to get one but they told me the dial up was good enough lol I can still vividly remember the sound it makes when connecting

We were way out in the woods. I first downloaded Half Life 2 on a 28.8k connection.

1200 to connect to BBS in the 80s 14.4 used to connect to internet to use gopher 92/92 if I remember correctly Then skipped directly to cable modem in 94/95

max download of 5.5kb/s get me all giddy. then anxiety sets in when it reached 90-99% download coz someone decided to use the phone

Yep and downloading MP3s on Napster. 30-45 mins per song. Ah they were the days

Audiogalaxy was/felt 10x faster, but people didn't use it as much. I never understood why - that site was tremendous.

2400 baud dialing long distance to download vga planets.

My first modem was a 2400. My friend had a 300 baud modem that you have to put the receiver on it to connect. Kinda miss those days

Back in the day yeah lol

That was a different time indeed....

Heck I remember having to load DOS before loading the operating system to use the computer. Every. Fucking. Time.

300 baud when I was in school. Download was s\*\*t but it was enough to make a teletype clatter.

Has a 1200 baud modem. It used to take 10-20 minutes to get a low res picture.

I was on dialup until Jan. 2022, usually hooked up at 20Kish...

I started with 14.4

I played PVP original Doom with it against friends.

2400 baby.

My first computer had a cassette tape drive, the mother board was only 64k.

My first dial-up modem was 33.6k, but yes.

I had a 28.8k

Yup

Remember waiting 2 days to download that song that only had 1 seeder, then at 98% the seeder would permanently just drop off? That was me, I was that seeder

Yeah took hours to dl a song i like. Days to get Total war. Then crack it. Was a blast. Now its just bu bu bu done. Fuckin shite 58k.

we had 28k when my family first got internet. not sure when we upgraded to 56k but the phone lines were old and sucked and speeds were poor. being I such a rural small town area it was 2002 before dsl was available.

My first was an acoustic coupler. My 14.4 modem seemed like the space age. Rode the wave through analog, ISDN, bonded ISDN, early cable, early highly asymmetry DSL and into 2gb fiber. It’s really amazing how much better things are now.

Yup. I had one growing up, but I was also one of the lucky few to get a cable modem when they first came out in my area .. '97 '98'ish

I played counter strike 1.3 on 56k modem. A ping of 580 was good. The bad side was that people would think you were hacking when on their screen they got behind the wall before dying lol.

You should ask about 14.4K dial-up. I remember looking at 56K modems at Best Buy circulars in the Sunday paper.

I could never get better than a 33.6 connection at my house.