When did you last use dial up Internet?

2006

2006/2007 may have been the greatest year in the history of the Internet because not everyone was on it yet, but you had Youtube and so on. It was that fleeting sweet spot between old and new eras. In 2007, the iPhone would be released, social media would explode, and things would never be quite the same.

Mini-boast: I got onto the ADSL trial with Telecom Eireann in either 1999 or 2000. We had 128kB up/down, then went to 256kB and then 512kB and I think we stayed on that for about 3 years. Then we were moved to another type of DSL where the upload/download speeds weren't asymmetrical.

Initially there was little fire-walling between hosts on the local ADSL exchange and the network subnet was a pretty wide scope, so we could browse using WINS for hosts and find other PC's on the network. Dangerous as feck. 😂

We got broadband in the summer of 2003. Before that we got ISDN in 1998. ISDN had its own phone line and was around 128kb which at the time was mind blowing. The biggest advantage of ISDN was it was a flat monthly fee so you could use it as much as you wanted without tying up the main phone line.

2009, I retired my Win 98 Pentium II computer at the same time as getting broadband.

The day we got high speed broadband out in the bog for the first time. Not a single sod of turf was footed for about a month.

2003. I had ADSL, I was freelancing in web development from my folk’s house, and me and another guy had built a site for a tour operator in Majorca. We were due to go live on a particular day at a particular time, when all of a sudden my broadband went down. On to support, and they had no indication when it would be back.

Scrambled through the recycling bin looking for one of the CD-ROMs that came with the Sunday papers back then promoting ISPs. Found one with a free trial for some dial-up provider, installed the software, registered and got set up on a shïtty 56 kbit/s connection that just about let us get the site live on time.

Broadband came back online about an hour later, and I was able to cancel the trial and never looked back.

2003, got broadband that year. Looking into the available options is what got me signed up to boards!

I haven't a clue tbh. It seems like a lifetime ago.

December 04

Around 2002 I waved goodbye to pings of 500 in Unreal Tournament and download speeds of 3kb/s.

It was mind-blowing being able to suddenly download an entire song in 60 seconds compared to 10-15 minutes before.

Still using it, the 4K porn takes ages to download. Getting a frame per day I think.

Can't remember exactly but it was somewhere between 2001 and 2003. Was living in London at the time and I upgraded to broadband as soon as it was first introduced by BT.

June 2006 in my house, but I could connect to dialup through my router, we changed provider after the contract was up because Digiweb throttled the speeds when you exceeded their cap. The last time I used dailup was in late-2007/early-2008 at a friend's house.