How fast was your first internet connection?

The world has changed in a lot of significant ways in the past few months. For many of us in IT, one of those ways is that we're all now keenly aware of the limits of home internet connections. Even for those who are lucky enough to have rock-solid connections are home, most of us are interfacing with folks every day who are battling with high latencies, not enough bandwidth, lost packets, intermittent connection issues, and a whole host of other problems.

And that's assuming home internet is even available and affordable, which while many of us may take this for granted, is not something that is at all universally true, especially outside of wealthier urban areas and countries.

Thinking back, almost all of us can remember a time when our connection to the internet was something less than it is today. Whether you came of age in the era of BBSs and other pre-internet dial-up experiences, or just had to deal with flaky DSL before getting fiber at home, you almost certainly have memories of a different time to look back on.

Personally, I remember the modem days quite fondly. I laugh out loud when I see videos of teens reacting to '90s Internet. For me, those were the golden days of the internet - when you could still browse a site with images and JavaScript disabled and get something usable. When even my 2400 baud modem would load a page in a reasonable amount of time. When you tied up your only phone line, a land line, for so many hours on end that your friends assumed you'd left town with the phone off the hook.

What was your first experience with the internet? Let us know in our poll above, and if you've got a cool story about sysadmining in the early days of the internet, consider submitting it for publication!

[ Now that we've moved past dial-up, are you still struggling with managing your modern network? Download a free ebook on network automation with Ansible. ]