Dial-Up Diary
Our house has ONE phone line and THREE people who all need it at 7pm. This page is my war diary. A progress bar used to be a form of hope, and my family were the enemy of hope.
The handshake
When our modem calls the internet, it screams at another modem down the phone line until they agree on a speed. The screaming is the negotiation. Everyone in the house can hear it. Dad imitates it at dinner. It is not funny, Dad.
How long a file took
| Connection | Time |
|---|---|
| 28.8 kbit/s | 13 min 53 s |
| 33.6 kbit/s | 11 min 54 s |
| 56 kbit/s | 7 min 09 s |
Why is this table optimistic?
It divides 24 million bits by the line rate and stops there. Real transfers lost time to noise on the line, error correction and protocol overhead, and a nominal speed was often not the speed you actually got.
Hear it
Try the handshake. A short reconstruction, played by your browser: dial tone, digits, the negotiation screech, and then a whole eighteen-kilobyte homepage arriving at 33.6k speed. Sound on, if you can bear it.
Idle. The line is shared, and nobody is on the phone.
Rules of the phone-line war
- If Dad picks up the phone to “just check something”, the connection DIES. Announce your downloads. Shout them. Write them on the fridge door.
- Mum's sister calls at the worst moment in human history, every time. This is now considered a law of physics.
- The phone bill arrives monthly, in an envelope, like a threat. My name has been said at dinner.
- If a page was worth waiting four days for, you remembered the address forever. I still know it. I will know it at 80.