56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience (56k.rip)

51 pointsby adunk4 hours ago27 comments

101008 4 minutes ago

Amazing. When we were all living offline by default, and you had to go online. Now sadly it's the opposite.

(When did this change? Around 2012?)

artyom 44 minutes ago

Lovely. 16MB of RAM in the 90s? That's luxury. And that dial-up sound always takes me back to happier times. Not unlike normal people's childhood songs.

ajasmin 9 minutes ago

That's surprisingly well done

VCFundedGenYer 24 minutes ago

Vibe coded replica, not the actual OS or programs.

Also riddled with inaccuracies.

strikefo an hour ago

this is great, but everything loads WAY too fast. It took forever to get anything to load back in the day.

aduty an hour ago

That's likely due to most phone lines not supporting the full 56k speed. In most areas you would be lucky to get 33.6k or 28.8k.

stingraycharles an hour ago

How is that related to phone lines, and not the dial up access point you’re dialing into?

iirc ISDN did require a special phone line, but 56k was fine over regular lines.

nekooooo 36 minutes ago

i think they're saying the actual speeds you'd get. i'd get faster speeds late at night (just me?)

sometimes you'd also reconnect because the handshake got messed up and you'd connect at 33.6 instead of 'real' 56k

TedDoesntTalk 26 minutes ago

56k modems didn’t always negotiate to the full 56k. The handshaking allowed connections at much slower speeds. It depended on the quality of the line. This is the US - we didn’t have ISDN, at least no one I knew had it in 1996.

insaneirish 26 minutes ago

> but 56k was fine over regular lines.

Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.

And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.

This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.

2muchcoffeeman 26 minutes ago

56k modems is an application of Shannon’s Theorem.

You only got max speeds where the noise was low enough.

illusive4080 2 hours ago

Cool, but webpages load too fast.

uproarchat an hour ago

It was fun chatting with you guys :D

t1234s an hour ago

Dialing in with Terminate and then using lynx was a real experience.

bonyt 44 minutes ago

A while back, I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to roughly max dialup speeds https://dialup.moveything.com/. It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that are fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.

It uses rate limit buckets per-IP on the server side, applied before SSL termination so it doesn't include that overhead. If you open two tabs, they'll have to share. If your behind a NAT, you'll have to share with your NAT-mates. And, it also has headers saying not to cache anything, so you can continue to enjoy the experience.

dnewcome 2 hours ago

I just remembered ripterm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Imaging_Protocol

asxndu an hour ago

Why do the websites feel faster than modern internet?

Vaslo an hour ago

A lot of people don’t know how cool it felt to dial into the internet or a service like Compuserve or Prodigy and suddenly have this whole world open up to you. Even at 56k.

doginasuit an hour ago

The patience we had waiting for, uh, pictures to load. The world will never know that kind of dedication again.

brightball an hour ago

Beautiful.

Now we just need to bring back BBS’s and the daily turn based games. Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, etc.

riddley 2 hours ago

Fun and cool. The News made me chuckle.

russellbeattie an hour ago

I'm sure someone pointed this out in the other thread, but 56kpbs modems essentially didn't exist in 1996. They launched at the end of the year, cost a ton, and the manufacturers hadn't standardized the speeds, so it really didn't matter much as you weren't browsing AOL, MSN or Compuserve with it yet.

33.6k.rip is a harder domain name to get though, so I get it.

zerozerotwo an hour ago

56k flex!

rvz 2 hours ago

[dupe] see previous conversations in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340252

the_hoffa 2 hours ago

Reminds me of this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/3227/

Select modem mode and just hurt.

Xeoncross an hour ago

That reminds me. Can we standardize cypress tests to load the website via a restricted speed as one of the tests? Some of of our modern webpages are still slow on the latest iPhone/Pixel/Samsung over 5G.

8,600,743 bytes of assets and frameworks later I'm finally able to see your contact-us address.

braden-lk an hour ago

I miss it.