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When I was growing up, 56.6kbps was the hotness. However, in the boonies where I lived, the best I could do was 33.6kbps. Most of the time, I was lucky to get 28.8, but would never get less than 14.4. Turned out, that the central switch for our town was so old and we were so far from it that there was no way for it to provide a clean enough signal for >33.6.

When HughesNet came out, we tried it. It was horrible. Only if we were lucky would we get a signal better than our dial-up's download speed. The thing about Hughes is that we still connected with a dial-up for Tx. Only Rx came from space.

All of that to say HELL YES, those are amazing speeds. However, as an adult, I became cityfolk, and have full 1Gbps up/down via fiber.



I remember as a teen I'd go on Digg and open all the articles in separate tabs so that by the time I was done reading the text ones some of the images would be loaded on the ones with pictures. We've come a long way.


Oh, you had tabs! We had to use new browser instances! Uphill, in the snow!

Seriously though, I still do this out of habit, as it's just how I like to read. Skim a front page, open all the articles in tabs, and then go back and peruse them.


I remember when Internet Explorer 7 released with tab support. I'd been using Firefox since 1.0 (something like 5 years at that point?)

He whisked me over to his laptop and started opening tabs, before looking at me like he was the first man to discover fire

When I responded "oh, I've had that for years" he looked genuinely shattered at my reaction


Tabs in 2000 with Opera v4, before it even had a freeware option!


Actually the way 56k worked is that the ISP would provide a digital signal to the phone switch, and not all phone switches supported this. The problem might have been distance but it was probably the age of the switch!




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