Ah, Napster! I remember it well…
Internet piracy has come so far since those early days. 
Haven’t watched it in a long time, but doesn’t Matthew Broderick use an acoustic coupler in Wargames (1983)?
My favorite backronym was from that era — “I Still Don’t Need”. DSL was much more practical once it became available.
I actually did watch some very crude streaming video back then, using RealPlayer. It wasn’t remotely a pleasant experience, as it would cut out pretty easily, and had like a 30 second buffering time, but it did technically work despite my connection being about 33kbps. It just wasn’t anything anyone would enjoy using. (The resolution and framerate were abysmal, too.)
Part of the reason I remember is that I stayed on dialup longer than most, as I got it free from the local school. I didn’t swap over until the mid 2000s, around the debut of YouTube.
Yep. I did things like that, too. I remember developing my own personal rule of thumb–downloading/buffering the video took about 4 times as long as the play length of the video. (On a good day.)
And all that got you something sort of like this.
It was a meme before memes were a thing:
To give the OP an idea just how slow the modems were, in 1984 in college I had a 300 baud modem while my roommate’s modem was 1200 baud. The 300 baud modem downloaded text so slowly that I could read faster than the text appeared.
The OP also mentions Netflix. When it started in 1997, the service mailed DVDs to its customers. Downloading a movie or TV show in advance wasn’t really feasible (let alone watching the movie or TV show as it downloaded, what we call streaming). But Reed Hastings, the founder, claims he was always planning to offer streaming when the internet speeds allowed for this.
300 baud translates to 30 characters per second, so definitely you could read faster than the transmission speed. Yet by some standards that was fast – the earliest modems provided 110 baud, which because of an extra stop bit in each character equated to 10 characters per second. This was fine because in many cases the terminal you were using was an ASR-33 teletype, which only worked at 10 cps. Since these teletypes were already built with serial interfaces by the nature of what they did, ASR/KSR-33 or -35 teletypes were an economical way of providing operator I/O for early minicomputers and even some mainframes. Ah, the good old days, when men were men and everything got written in assembler!
Another thing that dial-up allowed one to do was rack up long distance bills. $6/hour is what I remember in the mid 90’s.
Yes, the sounds you hear are the signal. The sound you hear at the beginning are the handshake, where the modems on each end are negotiating what speed and other things to use. Being audible is a sort of debug mode. That way you can tell if a person answers the phone at the other end. Once the handshake is complete, the speaker on the modem turns off. Of course if you pick up a handset on the same line, you’ll hear the signals.
During the handshake phase, it was very possible to hear the difference between a 14.4, 36.6, and 56k connection, so it was possible to abort the call and redial if it didn’t sync up fast enough.
The slow speed of dialup is due to something called the Shannon-Hartley theorem (or some such, perhaps an actual engineer type person will be along to explain it). Dialup modems can only operate within the sound frequencies that are used by the plain old telephone [voice] system (POTS). The maximum amount of data that can be transferred in a period of time is limited because a very restricted range of frequencies is available, just a subset of the frequencies of human hearing.
DSL uses a much wider range of frequencies, above those used by a POTS line, and the frequencies used for speech are left free for voice calls. If you pick up an unfiltered telephone line that has DSL you can hear hissing.
Online gaming was not nearly the kind of thing it is now. It was pretty novel before widespread home internet access. There were text based things like MUDS, but multiplayer gaming worked in a few different ways. First was a shared keyboard. One person used WASD and the other the arrow keys, or something. Local network play was a thing, but as PCs didn’t by default come with ethernet, and home networks were extremely rare, it was the kind of thing people had to plan for.
Some online games worked remarkably well over dialup. For example Quake (I think) was very playable. By this time people were connecting to the internet, even if it was over dialup.
Generally when people talk about a BBS in that time period they are referring to something that was not connected to the internet. You would dial directly into a BBS, which may have been sitting in somebody’s house. You would read and leave messages, upload and download (often pirated) files, and play turn based games. There were also things like the pre-internet CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, etc.
In the early 1990s, I was living in Westchester County and signed up for an ISP based in New York City (a very early Internet service called The Pipeline). I changed to a telephone service that allowed for unlimited calling throughout the NYC metropolitan area to avoid toll charges.
It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that it’s the exact opposite today. The ubiquity of high-speed internet and always-on broadband connections means that you can now communicate anywhere in the world essentially for free.
This ‘analogue vs digital’ also kind of confuses me; when people say that dial-up was analogue and DSL is digital. Could you explain what that means?
“Analog” phone lines send data (traditionally voice) over the wires by using traditional methods - taking a voltage and modulating it directly (maybe with some filtering) by a signal. If you were to put an oscilloscope on the line, you would see an AC voltage that was a one-to-one representation of the sound wave that created it.
“Digital” phone lines take that sound wave and create a numeric model of it. Then the numbers are transmitted down the line. How the transmission is accomplished varies based on the technology available. Early digital phone lines used something called DS 1. Modern phone calls are most likely made over Internet backbones, using TCP/IP.
One of the limitations of using old phone lines with modems was the maximum bandwidth of the analog-to-digital converters. Until DSL became available, that limited modem speeds to 56K in most cases.
Wikipedia has some good information: Telephony - Wikipedia
ETA: Oh, and - Everything is Analog, even Digital (when you get right down and look at the signal on the line). But, don’t let that bit of pedantry stop you from understanding the difference in how the two techniques were used.
When you spoke into an old telephone, your voice was encoded by a continuously varying electrical voltage, which is analogue in the same sense as a vinyl record. On the other hand, once you have a dial-up or DSL or fiber-optic line information is encoded using 1’s and 0’s, like on compact discs, which is what is meant by ‘digital’.
If you look at the picture of a waveform from binary frequency-shift keying, you can see it encodes only single bits, that’s digital, whereas if you look at waves produced by your FM radio you can see continuous variation:
The advantage of digital communication is that, even for something like a simple voice telephone call, it can use less bandwidth than a basic analogue scheme, and of course you can do all the fancy multiplexing and so on.
Ha! I remember them! I signed up for them to make my exit from AOL… they distributed an incredibly badly written proprietary web browser that by itself gave me reason to cancel and try again with some outfit called “Earthlink Total Access” which bundled Netscape Navigator instead.
Not really.
When the ASR-33 Teletype was introduced, COBOL had been out for nearly 5 years, and the Defense Department was about to make it a mandatory for government computers. And Grace Hopper and Jean Sammet (both not men) were a huge part of developing COBOL.
Back in the mists of time I was a student at University of Waterloo, my first computer course used FORTRAN and we typed the code onto punch cards. I discovered a small room in the basement one of the engineering buildings that had 4 terminals with acoustic-coupler modems, so I’d enter my assignments through them, and get the output, then make up a fake card stack with only the first 5 or so cards actually matching the program to hand in.
The reason I mention this is that other students used the phones in the room to make long distance calls to friends and family, to the point where one day I tried to enter the room only to find the door locked and a warning sign posted on it. I had been coding up an adventure game and never got to complete it…
So, would I be correct to think of analogue as ‘information that is transmitted without manipulation’ and digital as ‘or information that is manipulated to preserve quality and increase efficiency in transmission’?
So dial-up doesn’t convert information to binary form until it reaches the destination computer? And DSL converts it to binary form before transmitting the information through the phone line as an analogue signal, and then converts it again to binary form so that the computer can understand?
‘Analog’ meant it connected to a system designed to handle telephone calls.
‘Digital’ meant that it connects to a system that is NOT designed to handle telephone calls.
Even at the time, most people just used the words “analog” and “digital” as labels, divorced from any actual meaning. What that means is that when you read old information about ‘modems’, what you read about ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ often didn’t make any sense.
In particular, you may read about the ‘analog’ side of a modem, and the ‘digital’ side of a modem. Those are just terms of reference: both sides are digital. At the time most people didn’t understand that. So they often tried to ‘explain’ the naming convention in ways that really don’t make any sense.
The old ‘analog’ modem note meaningless naming convention! signal had to go through a telephone exchange. The first systems had to traverse analog telephone exchanges (in that phrase, the term ‘analog’ has a real meaning) that injected a lot of noise and many errors: this put an absolute limit on how fast they worked.
Later, the telephone exchanges were all digital, but low speed digital, and had low-speed filters and transcoders. (transcoders change the digital coding from one system to another).
The very last ‘analog’ modems were integrated into the digital exchange system at the ISP end, so the ISP didn’t have to go through an ‘analog’ modem and a transcoder. That allowed them to send data at the maximum speed of the digital exchange. That was your download speed. They were still limited to a data rate designed for 1 telephone line.
Even with those final fast modems, at your end you still had to connect through a telephone line and a dial-up telephone exchange, so your upload speed was still limited by the standards set for telephone calls, slightly less than the data rate your ISP could get, connecting directly into the system.
Which brings us to ‘digital’ systems, DSL and Cable. Those are not telephone systems, so they aren’t called ‘analog’, and they aren’t limited to the standards required by old telephone exchanges and old long-distance telephone calls.