Broadband Internet
Remember ISDN? Integrated Service Digital Network? Although it’s possible that you do, it’s far more likely that you don’t. It was the closest thing to broadband in 1999.
No, the vast majority of people accessed the internet from a 56k modem. Those who were not at least in the lower-middle class, however, had to dink around a 14.4 modem, or worse: 2400 baud. It’s enough to make one shudder.
Back then, though, the internet was a much simpler place. Text, images and an occasional embedded MIDI were all that was expected of any given website. Animated GIF’s were the future, and Flash showed some serious potential.
These days, however, the internet is a wonderland of bandwidth-sucking marvels. Streaming video and music, BitTorrent and Cloud Storage systems are everyday necessities and require almost as much bandwidth as our hard drives do. If you were to try to watch a 10 minute Youtube video back in 1999, it would take 68 minutes to buffer. These days, if it takes more than 15 seconds, we get our ISP on the line.
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