Some of you guys have been on the internet for two or three decades. What are the major changes that have occurred these years?
- Thread starter Jacuzzi_Splott
- Start date
rsaeon
Guide
As someone who had to load balance 64kbps connections during the 'Hitec City' era, this statement has incredible weight to it.
Jacuzzi_Splott
Apprentice
Thank you for your kind responses. I'd like to provide a little bit of context. I got access to the internet in mid-2016. It was an amazing thing for me because I had no idea that you could access almost all sorts of information from the same contraption, which was primarily used by me to play video games on. It was a pleasant experience for me, reading Wikipedia pages, articles, and watching YouTube videos. I even had Facebook, Twitter, and other mainstream social media to stay connected to the current topics and trends. Slowly, this thing turned into an addiction for me. I'd waste hours and hours watching literally anything on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media. That led me to think about what caused all this. People were definitely on the internet two or three decades ago, but they weren't addicted like I was.
blr_p
Northstar
I was once decided to download a DVD. At the 128kbs Airtel offered at the time it would take a week. I was due for a trip across the state and one week later returned to find it would take just a half hour longer to complete
Nobody attempts such a project without the right tools and this is where rsync came in handy. This was the first download tool (among many other features) of its time that did checksums and then re-downloaded only the corrupted bits to ensure the download was accurate to the byte. No such luck with Web downloads which were iffy at best or even ftp. Corrupted files meant you had to attempt the whole download again
This feature of self correction has since been incorporated with torrents so no more corruption occurs when downloading.
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Dialup till broadband and 4G, we have come a long way.
blr_p
Northstar
Think of moving to a new city. It will take time to get to know the place. The Internet is like that only much bigger. Global village as they call it. There are good areas and bad areas and with experience you learn to navigate. There is always something new to discover if you hang out with like minded people.
Addicted has a negative connotation. Learning a positive one. Everyone gets hooked when they started and with time become more selective where and how they spend their time.
I never got on Facebook or social media. My relationship with social media is strictly read only and that was good enough.
rsaeon
Guide
Everyone here probably went through something similar at some point. I remember my first semester finals in 2001, instead of studying Biochemistry I was looking up Advantech single board computers based on the Intel 810 chipset. The learning became the addiction. Then halfway through my second semester, I bought Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and didn't see sunlight for two weeks — Microbiology became a backlog that took three attempts to clear.
Some time between then and now, I learned of the Pomodoro technique and that brought balance between life and screentime.
I was once decided to download a DVD. At the 128kbs Airtel offered at the time it would take a week. I was due for a trip across the state and one week later returned to find it would take just a half hour longer to complete
I still remember, fondly, building a seedbox with a 733MHz Pentium 3, 128MB of ram and a 80GB hard drive and spending three months downloading Star Trek TNG with Azureus in 2003.
Some years before that, I would spend a week on dialup after everyone went to sleep, an hour or two a day, just to download the Quake3 demo (it was 50MB) from CNET.
blr_p
Northstar
I follow geopolitics more than tech. That makes me a news junkie. You go through a binge, watch till you drop phase and then you get more picky. A lot of reporting is speculative. Initially this seems very interesting but later you realise your time is better spent after something happens than getting anxious and talking about it before it does. In the race for views there is a lot of attention seeking content out there that hooks you with click bait titles. You get clued into this with time. Same pattern exists in other areas.
Sometimes it's interesting to take a break and see how much changed in the interim and I find in a lot of cases not that much.
Sometimes it's interesting to take a break and see how much changed in the interim and I find in a lot of cases not that much.
kartikoli
Herald
I remember downloading a 7mb video clip from a direct link on a 64kbps Airtel connection with took almost full day and I had to call them multiple time because my connection would reset after few hours and the file would stop at around 80~90%. It was non resume link so had to start everything all over again.I was once decided to download a DVD. At the 128kbs Airtel offered at the time it would take a week. I was due for a trip across the state and one week later returned to find it would take just a half hour longer to complete
It bring smile when we get 8kbps speed instead of 5~6 while downloading and excitement when sometimes airtel give 50~60 kbps speed while upgrading there system (that was a time when you can't decide what to download while the extra speed lasts).