The first thing I downloaded when I went from Dial-up to 1.5mbps(old internet stories)

[Calavera]

I just randomly thought of this. Back in 2007 I finally got rid of dial-up and got a "high-speed" connection of 1.5mbps. We're talking going from 2kb/s to 185kb/s

I remember the first game I downloaded. For some reason it was Tron 2.0



I remember nothing about the game except that it was the first game I downloaded on high-speed. Shortly after I got an account first at Underground Gamer and then at Bitgamer. I donated to UG so I could download as much as I wanted without having to worry about uploading since my upload was terrible.

Bitgamer and Underground Gamer, man those were the days! UG was basically an archive of old computer games. They had pretty much any old game you could think of. My first really big download was from Underground Gamer. The complete Dreamcast collection which I downloaded and then burned them all to CD-Rs and printed out labels for them. I had a big CD binder with every Dreamcast game in it. It was pretty awesome.

Typing that out reminded me of an even older internet memory, from somewhere around the late 90s. The place where I got tons of retro roms one at a time. That magical place was known as Plasticmans Emulation Zone. It was amazing at the time. Not only did it have every SNES,Genesis and probably many other system's roms. But each game had a little description/review next to it. I wonder if it is saved at all on the wayback machine. I'd love to take a look at it again. It has probably been over 20 years since I last saw it.

So how about you guys? Any internet stories from the olden days you'd like to share

P.S. Roofus if you are reading this. Taking over that random forum and Ace's Night. I'll never forgot and continue to bring those up every now and again as long as this forum exists!

[ian]

I member when the Dreamcast had a 56Kb modem and in Australia they only included a 33.6Kb modem as they wanted to future-proof as that would remain the fastest speed in the country untill 2011. When my first Dreamcast game finishes downloading I'll let you know.

The first things I downloaded with High Speed internet (at school) were King of the Hill and Futurama episodes circa 2002 because channel 7 kept airing them later and later at night, and showing the damn episodes out of fucking order. I still have the episodes I downloaded, and the VHS tapes I was recording off TV before they put them on crossing midnight right before the infomercials started.

I didn't get my own high speed ADSL2 connection untill 2007.
Incidentally, my ADSL 2 connection was faster and more reliable than any home connection I can currently get at the same house in 2022. I was consistently at the theoretical max limit of ADSL2 for several years and it was glorious.
Then it started to get slower and slower and when the drop outs started up I left and have used mobile data (4G) since. And then home connections got worse when we got our National Broadband Network.

When my current phone and 4G modems die I'll either go 5G with some high gain massive antennas or give starlink a try.