The Internet of the mid 90s is often romanticized in similar manner to the
american old west. The freedom from monopolistic corporations, a greater
degree of user control, the millions of AOL CDs and floppies. It was a new
frontier, explored by brave adventurers, hopping by hyperlink from site to
site. Simple HTML rendered on a flickering cathode ray tube display was
magical. If this view is to be trusted, it was the true golden age of the
Internet.
The most common negative side of this technological utopia, as seen
through the lens of today, was the speed. The most advanced modems of the
time had a theoretical upper limit of 56 Kbps (7 kilobytes per second.)
Typically, it would be between 40 and 50 Kbps, depending on factors like
location and hardware quality. There are still some people who use
dial-up, whether it be forced upon them by their rural location or they
just have no need for anything more. I, for one had AOL dial-up well into
the 2000s due to there being no reasonable alternatives where I lived.
By the standards of today, the bandwidth offered by dial-up is minuscule,
but is it enough for a techie in the 21st century? I genuinely have no
idea, as the utility I am going to use for this experiment is compiling as
I type this. Because of modern website design trends, it will take
significantly longer to load anything than on any kind of modern
connection. Thanks to *socialMedia(api)Library2.0Integration.js, more
bandwidth than ever is required to load sites in a reasonable amount of
time. For the purposes of this experiment, I will be using the browser
extension uBlock Origin to slim down sites and make them more fit for
limited connections. While it is mainly shown as an ad blocker, the
extension can be used to block anything.
The Results:
Basic sites still load at an acceptable rate, being on par with what I
remember. The limitations really start to show while trying to visit more
complex pages. Accessing the home page of the local newspaper took so long
that I had time to make a cup of tea before all assets had been downloaded
and rendered. Obviously, this is far from ideal. After using uBlock, I was
able to significantly reduce this time by preventing the download of large
images and other unnecessary parts of the page. This improved performance
across the board, though it was still far from high speed.
Final Thoughts:
Despite the difficulties of a slow connection, I truly enjoyed this little
window into the past. With a limited connection, I ended up wasting far
less time and was able to get much more done in a day. If you have time to
clean the kitchen while a video buffers, it is easy to get motivated to do
just that. While I do not plan to implement these bandwidth limits on a
regular basis, it was enjoyable to gain some insight into just how heavy
modern web technologies are and get stuff done in the process.
