So, it wouldn’t be impossible to watch, say, a 15-minute HD video on YouTube with 56K, it would just take an eternity to do it? But it wouldn’t be literally impossible to buffer the entire video for a few days and then watch it in HD, or yes?
Maybe it wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be very expensive. Someone said $6/hour above.
Anyway, the HD video formats we use use today, like mp4, didn’t even exist then. Existing video formats were either low-res or very large files. You wouldn’t even find HD videos on the internet.
You know that YouTube was only created in 2005, and bought by Google in 2006, right?
We didn’t have the hard drive space to buffer the video. I mean, video professionals did, and Photoshop pros did, but ordinary mortals had 450 MB hard drives, which already had our operating systems and our existing files sitting on them… where you gonna write a temp file large enough to buffer a 15 minute HD video?
…and a few weeks ago I tested our newly-upgraded cable service and got 660 megabits/s down and 36 megabits/s up…
Obviously that was a facetious comment not meant to be taken too seriously. But there is an element of truth to it.
Hopper and Sammet were geniuses who are rightly celebrated, but women were very much in the minority in the nascent field of computer science. One could also mention Ada Lovelace, who was brilliantly prescient about the potential of computers long before they existed.
And while high-level languages like COBOL and FORTRAN, for business and scientific applications, respectively, were brilliant innovations for their time and extremely valuable in boosting programming productivity, they were primarily the domain of mainframes. Minicomputers like the very popular PDP-8 simply were not powerful enough, generally speaking, to support truly useful high-level languages, and assembler was the order of the day.
I’ll add for the sake of completeness that the PDP-8 did have an interpreted language called FOCAL, similar to BASIC, which was a marvel of optimization in being able to fit into 4K of memory and still have room left for the program itself, but this was really primitive stuff. Years later, it did get a functional FORTRAN IV compiler, but this required an add-on co-processor (FPP-8) about the size of a household refrigerator, which had a full instruction set much more powerful than the PDP-8 itself – a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Or you could get by with an FPP interpreter, but then you were hugely trading off speed for functionality, again limiting its utility.
450 MB? My dear fellow, you must be nearly as young as our OP. 
When I was in university, the academic computing needs of the campus were mostly served by a PDP-10 timesharing system. It had about six or so RP02 disk drives. Each one was about the size of a washing machine and had a capacity of 20 MB.
Much later DEC introduced the fabulous RP04 with an awesome capacity of around 86 MB, also the size of a washing machine. Later still, one could get PCs with optional hard drives in addition to floppies. I had one. The disk was about the size of a pizza box and sat underneath the PC. It had a capacity of 10 MB. The operating system was Windows 2.0.
I remember when I got a PC with a 20MB drive, and I thought, “Wow! So much space!” 
Of course, it was a lot of space at the time. You didn’t have videos, photos, mp3s, etc. and a big program was a few hundred k. If I remember correctly, that PC had 1MB of RAM.
“you couldn’t plug your own phone into the wall…”
Ah, so young. In those days you had to pay for the phone company to come and install extensions, they were hard-wired to the wall - the phone was screwed down in that little square box on the baseboard using little lugs on the wires. Eventually they went to RJ11 jacks, If the phone company was feeling too mercenary, they would test the current draw by the bells when the phone rang, and figure out that there were unsanctioned extensions in the house and charge you for them. Their excuse was that unapproved phones might cause problems with the lines; plus the ringer bells in those days drew a lot of current, so if you had too many extensions in the house, you could overload the system. A second phone in the house was luxury - pure luxury.
(Fun fact - when I helped convert my company to VoIP from an incredibly antiquated system many years ago - by then ringers were low current, so we then found that the VoIP equipment could not ring the bells in those old black phones in some of the remote back rooms. If you laid the phone on its side so the hammer had gravity assist it would ring the bell - weakly. Fortunately we had to replace those phones anyway since they were rotary dial, something else that went the way of the dodo. )
Others have mentioned that you wouldn’t have enough
memory or storage space to store the movie. You also would lack the processing power to decode it quickly enough to play it back, and would not have HD screens to watch them on.
Not even YouTube when it started in 2005 pushed anything near HD video. You just eventually had “HQ” video, which started out as, I believe, 360p and later became 480p. Neither was playable on dialup, even with buffering.
Dialup’s heyday was well before YouTube, but I do know some people who still used it (including myself when my DSL went down), and you could successfully buffer the short videos on YouTube at the time if you kept the resolution low.
That is not, however, what I was talking about with RealPlayer. I was talking about very low quality “live” video. I’m talking lower than 144p, and with horrible framerates. The screen would often freeze with just the audio playing–and the audio sounded pretty bad, too. And it would buffer like crazy at event he slightest drop in connection speed, which wasn’t uncommon.
It was just a fun thing to mess around with, not anything practical to actually use. I’m pretty sure it was made more for places like colleges that had faster connections.
It all depends on how far back we’re stepping. A mere five years before the 450 MB it would have been 40 MB for me, and along with it an aging 2400 baud modem instead of the 56K. And two years prior to that, the space available on an 800K floppy (but I hadn’t even heard of a modem at that point). The point remains the same: storage space to spool a buffered online video was off in the future in the dialup era.
If you want an idea of what video was like back in the dialup days, look at a viral video from the time. The original South Park - Spirit of Christmas shorts on the Internet Archive. In particular, the Real Media link. That is a nearly 4 minute video at a 192x144 pixel resolution and 12 frames per second. That 3MB file would take about 8 minutes to download over full speed 56k connection, and 15 minutes at 28.8k.
A very expensive 21" 4:3 screen from back then would be 1600x1200 in resolution, and I high resolution 15" home display might be 1280x1024. A more typical nicer home screen would be 1024x768. 800x600 would be the cost-cutter resolution.
No, that is not correct. Very simply,
analogue = continuously varying physical quantity
digital = numbers
They both transmit it through the phone line (copper wires) as an analogue signal, and in both cases the binary/digital information is encoded in that signal (see the pictures).
Yes, live video chat over the Internet existed in the 1990s but for the stated reasons text chat was more practical.
56 kilobaud, basically 56KB/sec, was about as fast as a consumer modem would go in the 80’s. Much of the decade was spent at 300 or 1200 baud.
Not trying to be too pedantic, just remembering back to the days where I could out type my connection. 56k modems were not introduced until the late 90s. The top speed during the 80s was 9600 baud, and those were very expensive. In the 80s we mostly existed at 2400 baud, if we were lucky.
To be picky, “baud” is “signal transitions per second” and is only the same as bits per second if each signal transition = one bit. Especially at the higher rates, more than one bit is transmitted per transition.
Easy example, 4 tones for 00, 01, 10 and 11.
Brian
You’re right. Compuserve, 1989, 2400bps. 30 years is a long time. Now I run fiber at 500Gb/sec, and don’t even care about baud rate or parity anymore.
Back in BBS days, we’d actually schedule meetups to trade giant (800KB+) pieces of software because over the net was so slow.
Compuserve (Columbus, Ohio) had pretty good forums, news, chat, email, games, downloads, shopping, travel, etc., but I do not remember it offering direct connection to the Internet from your home as a service, certainly at least not in the 1980s and/or before SLIP and PPP protocols were defined. Or am I mistaken? On the contrary, you had to pay $$$ per hour to get online with them and it was more for higher speeds like 2400 bps or using toll-free dial-up access or X.25. Probably that was less of a problem for their original business clientele, but by the mid-1980s they were big with personal subscribers.
I remember BBS’s (bulletin board systems). They were horrible in retrospect, even though they seemed pretty good at the time. It was like the internet except without the internet part. You would connect your computer directly to another computer by telephone lines.
So if you wanted to download a game from Rusty n Edie’s, for example, you dialed their phone number and then plugged the phone into your computer.
A “big” company like Rusty n Edie’s would have several dedicated telephone lines for receiving calls. But many BBS’s were being run off a single line. Which meant that if you called and somebody else was connected with the BBS, all you got was a busy signal. Plus while you were connected to a BBS, your phone was in use which meant nobody could call you.
The modem speeds meant it could take hours to download a single program. And the services could be shaky. A lot of times, you’d get disconnected in the middle of a download and would lose everything you had been downloading.
You also had nothing online like Google to help you find a BBS. So one of the things that got exchanged on BBS’s was lists of active BBS’s. Or you could go to a newsstand and buy a directory of BBS.
You wanted to find a BBS in your area code whenever possible because the phone companies often charged you extra fees for making long distance calls. And those fees could add up to quite a bit when you were making calls that might last several hours.
Which is why AMUG (the Arizona Macintosh Users Group) came out the BBS in a Box: