This morning I tooted that our internet speed had jumped to about half a gig, something that is quite amazing in terms of infrastructure for rural Victoria. Admittedly it's only that fast on download, upload speeds are still comparatively slow
but basically fast enough that you really don't need to worry about speed and latency when moving data about. In fact, compared to my first year documenting Dow's when I would upload my days work, typically 70 or 80 jpegs and and a few spreadsheets, at home, I would flood our ADSL connection, it seems pretty magical.
Then, I couldn't actually upload the data at Dow's, the internet was simply too slow down there, so I ended up resorting to sneakernet and saving my work to a USB drive before uploading it at home.
At the time that our fast ADSL connection seemed fairly zippy, especially compared to our house in Canberra where our ADSL connection was incredibly slow and I ended up investing in a 3G router that was plugged into the ISP's modem.
The 3G router used a USB stick modem to connect to the internet, but could be configured to use the ethernet connection to the ISP's modem by default and only fail over to the 3G connection if our rather flaky connection over the old copper wire phone system went away - which it did every time in rained
The fact the phone cable went via our neighbour's apple tree probably didn't help much either..
Before then we had dialup over a 56k modem.
But that wasn't our first dialup internet.
Around 1990 or 1991 I bought a Global Village Teleport Bronze 2400 baud modem which I plugged into the back of my Mac Classic.
There was something quite magical then about being able to open a terminal session and log into the dialup gateway of the university where I then worked and check the health of servers, send emails, and upload and download documents to work on at home.
This was at a time before the worldwide web and text based systems such as gopher were as sophisticated as it got, and there were no real ISPs (in fact we had to shoot down a thought bubble from marketing about starting an ISP in the mid nineties, instead we used to suggest that people use the British Library's service which was a rebadged version of one of the big commercial ISPs.)
It was of course a simpler time.
Letters still came in the mail, and if you needed to order something you either sent the order in the mail, or if it was urgent, by fax, and the internet was really still just an academic plaything.
Contrast that to today, where the internet is essential to just about everything we do, as was shown in the case of Tonga when a volcanic eruption not only cut off the connection to the rest of the planet, but between the main island and outlying islands.
The loss of the internet was crippling, all the more so because the previous satellite based service had been abandoned because the new service was just so much better, and everything, and I mean everything went via the now broken undersea cable ...
