Sal's ➶ ⋆˙⟡

Those old modem upgrades

I liked Kev’s recent post, Upgrading My Home Internet to Full Fibre.

I too wrote about upgrading to fiber (as we Yanks spell it), but this is the part I want to talk about:

I remember when I upgraded from a 56k MODEM, to ~2Mbps broadband and it blew my mind. I was thinking this would be the same, but no.

Man, those old modem upgrades were the best.

The one that still gives me nerd-tingles is when I upgraded to a 14.4k modem. I was playing multi-user dungeons (MUDs) back then, which were text-based adventures where many users could play simultaneously; the early, super geeky precursor to games like World of Warcraft. They looked something like this:

MUD example screenshot Image courtesy of Wikipedia per CC BY-SA 3.0.

This was probably around 1993, making me 13ish. I’d stay up until 3 or 4 am during summer vacation, dialed in on the family computer, hoping my parents wouldn’t wake up to go pee and find me still in the living room, bathing in the CRT glow.

Before my 14.4, a page of MUD text would progressively load a few lines at a time, probably due to all the embedded ANSI color codes slowing it down. This meant a single screen of the game would load over several iterations and seconds.

When I upgraded to 14.4, the page would load all at once in a flash. It was freaking awesome. I was blown away.

I later upgraded to 56k, and then finally got access to my first high-speed line (a T1 or something) when I went to college and stayed in the dorms. Those upgrades were big and super exciting, too.

But it’s the memory of that colorful MUD text racing down the screen that sticks with me the most. Those were fun times. Peak PC.