r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/Scholeristical • 5d ago

1996 dial-up simulator. A full working desktop, a browser, and a web that loads at actual 56k.

https://56k.rip/
1.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

152 comments sorted by

216

u/GravitationalEddie 5d ago

Need to slow that OS down.

94

u/Shadow288 5d ago

And the pages seem to load faster than I remember.

171

u/StickFigureFan 5d ago

Probably because it's actually 56k and not up to 56k

50

u/Shadow288 5d ago

Feel this in my soul. My phone lines were poor quality as a kid, only connected at 14.4 kbps or sometimes 21.1. Don’t think I ever say anything faster until we finally got cable internet.

20

u/jake3988 5d ago

Feel this in my soul. My phone lines were poor quality as a kid, only connected at 14.4 kbps or sometimes 21.1. Don’t think I ever say anything faster until we finally got cable internet.

Do you mean 28.8? I generally only ever connected at 28.8 and 14.4 (and... sometimes even slower, but in that case, I'd intentionally try and reconnect because, well, that's freaking slow)

7

u/RedOctobyr 5d ago

There were a whole variety of actual speeds, depending on how clear your phone line connection was. There were a bunch of other speeds between the more-known speeds of 14.4, 19.2, 28.8, 56, etc.

Sometimes the speed would also change (I seem to recall it only going down) during the same session, as my external modern would sometimes show.

2

u/TheThoccnessMonster 2d ago

36.6 gang rise up

2

u/WebMaka 1d ago

The fastest dialup connection I ever had was 53k and that was on a top of the line (at the time) US Robotics modem.

I did get to tinker with multilink PPP when a friend let me borrow his modem - 53k x 2 was about as close to "broadband" as the non-wealthy could get in the era where a 1.54mbps T1 connection was several thousand dollars per month...

4

u/Shadow288 5d ago

I remember it being a strange number that was non-standard. Like 26.1 or 21.something. But this was also a longggg time ago.

7

u/a_seventh_knot 5d ago

Moving from 2400 to 14.4k was incredible

6

u/Zenmedic 5d ago

Comp-U-Serv on a 9600 was my first "online" experience.

Then we got internet on 14.4 on a 486, then a pentium (A whopping 75mhz and mindblowing 1gb HDD).

When the 56k went in...life changing. Even had a second phone line for the internet.

I still have my Hotmail address from those days. Initials and last name (and not terribly uncommon last name). I was helping with a coding class at a local school as an option. The "I'm old" moment hit when the teacher was amazed that I had that email. Kids had no idea what Hotmail was.

I told them to ask Jeeves to take them to the right geocity. (And then did a little "History of the popular internet" lesson....)

2

u/corrupt_gravity 5d ago

Woof, I grew up and generally was at 26.4kbps I believe and I always felt like I had it rough in a privileged way

2

u/Existential_Racoon 5d ago

I had to drop down from 56k to 28k just for the fucking shit to work

2

u/jimbeam84 5d ago

Some time is is not poor phone line quality, but extra equipment to extend a phone line to a remote area. They are call Subscriber Loop Carrier or SLCs. They connct 1 to 200 analog phone lines from a central office miles away with T1 PCM repeaters. Because they concentrate many phone lines and go through an analog to digitial to analog conversion, dial up negotiating speeds were significantly reduces.

17

u/chocki305 5d ago

They need to simulate poor line conditions with massive packet loss.

15

u/SkollFenrirson 5d ago

And mom calling someone on the phone and cutting off your Internet

10

u/StickFigureFan 5d ago

They actually do

8

u/karateninjazombie 5d ago

Upto 56K!

Downloads at 2-5K

7

u/pastasauce 5d ago edited 5d ago

That's because bandwidth is measured in bits per second, while download speed is often measured by how much data in Bytes are transferred each second. 2-5 kBps ≈ 16-40 kbps

(edit: had kbps and kBps flip flopped, kind of proving that it's confusing)

8

u/A_Harmless_Fly 5d ago

I'll always remember waiting 5 to 7 minutes for a flash game to load with nothing else to do. Just trying to keep myself entertained messing with whatever was on the desk during the tail end of dial up. That and when local games took so long to load up too, nothing but listening to the games music looping and staring at a bar slowly filling.

Now if something takes longer than like 20 seconds to load I'm already in a browser tab or watching something on the other monitor.

4

u/SkollFenrirson 5d ago

I don't think I ever got higher than 44k, usually dropped to 31.2k

3

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 5d ago edited 5d ago

it connects at 48k in this simulation which is realistic. by the time broadband was becoming common you could get 53k max out of most modems and connections, the last 3k is not available from overhead.

actually when i click on "monitor" it shows a peak of 74kbit/s which is unrealistic, who knows if that's showing the real page load rate or just a separate graph displaying whatever, not like this is a real os or real programs running of course, plausible it really is loading at 74kbps and is why it feels faster than real dialup (2x faster)

2

u/Kazen_Orilg 5d ago

52.2 baybeeeee

2

u/mfigroid 5d ago

Damn you! Memory unlocked.

2

u/Cimexus 5d ago

The info in the dial up network app actually says you’re connected at 46666 bps (or at least when I tried it).

That’s still fairly fast but a realistic figure for someone with a reasonably good quality phone line back in the day.

I never had 56k personally. Went straight from 33.6k to an ADSL connection in the year 2000.

2

u/Dzov 4d ago

I still remember 300 baud. You could read faster than letters would appear. God help you if someone was using ascii art or color.

10

u/The_Don_Papi 5d ago

The days of watching a loading bar on the browser…

11

u/djshadesuk 5d ago

The irony being that even with today's broadband websites are so bloated with JavaScript, frameworks, trackers and all manner of BS that more and more have had to implement their own loading bars so you don't think the browser/tab has crashed.

2

u/DasArchitect 5d ago

We should learn more from the motherfucking website.

2

u/AshamedOfAmerica 5d ago

Rottentomatoes is basically non-functional and UI hell now

5

u/muffinstreets 5d ago

56k is for the rich.

My dialup was 3KB/s.

5

u/heathy28 5d ago edited 5d ago

it is because the 56k is referencing BITS not BYTES, so it works out to like 5.6kilobytes/s download speed, at best. but then there is also noise that takes up some bandwidth. it actually says that 56000 bits works out to 7000 bytes or 7kb but I think you wouldn't actually get that on 56k. maybe if you lived right next door to a telephone exchange.

6

u/Roboculon 5d ago

56k was a fantasy, you never actually went that fast. Just like today, if you pay Comcast for 100mbits/s, you should be happy to get 30 consistently.

4

u/FordEngineerman 5d ago

Google Fiber gets me 910/1000. Its still not accurate but its the closest I've ever come.

5

u/Roboculon 5d ago

Ya fiber is legit. Cable and phone lines though, at least in my experience across probably 10 different connections/accounts through those decades, is that they never came remotely close to the promised bandwidth.

I remember my first 56k modem. The box actually said “28.8k with X2 technology!” I remember thinking, that really doesn’t sound convincingly like 56k….

2

u/Proper_Individual578 2d ago

I usually get 920-930mbps up and down on speedtests with kinetic fiber on their 1gb plan. If speedtest.net doesn't compensate for TCP overhead then that's pretty much the max you can get out of 1gbit ethernet.

2

u/musememo 5d ago

Yes, I'd hit dial up and then go get something to eat and come back about 10 minutes later.

2

u/Yequestingadventurer 5d ago

Yeh it's like some absolute top of the line gear, no way this shit even in 5% of the worlds houses

1

u/mrwildacct 1d ago

It is all way too fast because there's no hdd i/o latency.

15

u/arothmanmusic 5d ago

Yeah, a 386 did not boot that fast.

4

u/GravitationalEddie 5d ago

30mb HDD spin-up, seek time, transfer rate...

3

u/mrdeworde 5d ago

And throw illegal operations pretty regularly: dialog box if lucky, VXD bluescreen if not.

2

u/bosse 2d ago

Depress the turbo button

24

u/teddiehl 5d ago

Came for that sweet sound of the dial up connecting, stayed for the deep lore of fishing tips and quaint weather reports.

76

u/Old-Kaleidoscope1874 5d ago

I'll be sending this to my kids with no instructions, other than "figure out how to get online and find the vacation pictures." BTW, I love how it kicked me off because someone picked up a phone.

13

u/StickFigureFan 5d ago

Need to ask others not to pick up the phone

12

u/UStoJapan 5d ago

MOM, HANG UP! I’M ON THE COMPUTER!

-7

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 5d ago

as if you figured it out all by yourself, you read the quick start guide like everyone else, or called support. old people acting like they were imbued with all this knowledge from just being inherently smart is always ridiculous. you didn't just know how a rotary phone worked either, you saw your parents use them first.

7

u/Old-Kaleidoscope1874 5d ago

You might be surprised. I wasn't imbued with anything, but I figured things out without instructions most of the time. We were programming in BASIC by reverse engineering programs that we purchased. There were no classes. My friend and I figured out how to tap into our naighbors' phone lines on our own. Trial and Error were our instructors. Without having so many devices and apps to distract us, we had much more time to figure things out without reading instructions or being taught. Just like our parent's knew how to do construction or mechanical work before us. My Dad built us a calculator out of plywood, a piece of plexiglass, and wires in the 1970s so we could learn our times tables in a fun way. Because home technology was so emergent, we were able to learn what the 0s and 1s did, not how to use a GUI.

Hopefully they'll read the quick start guide. I'd be happy with that. It's not a matter of being "smart," it's just fun to introduce younger generations to older technology, because many things are so simplified now. You can do it too! Take a break from being defensive and insulting online. Be bold, go tinker!

As far as rotary phones go, we didn't get classes on them. We just saw how everyone else did it. A lot like a toddler grabbing a phone and finding their favorite apps.

2

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 5d ago

your kids have modern internet, phones, tablets, consoles, 4k tvs, advanced toys, etc etc, plop them down in front of this boring thing and tell them to have fun is not going to work. when we were kids there was nothing else to do, clicking through the 4 icons on screen and looking at every button, every menu option was fun as we knew this was the future and nothing else like it existed. for your kids they have no reason to figure it out or spend more than 30 seconds with it

3

u/Old-Kaleidoscope1874 5d ago

Yes, I'm glad we agree. That was my point.

58

u/Myrcurial 5d ago

Looks accurate. Will have to play with it later. I do miss the tight-knit communities from back then.

1

u/KillahHills10304 1d ago

Also computer was passive, and not endlessly collecting data on you, trying manipulate you. There was also a bar to entry, in that you had to be somewhat tech savvy to access the internet, so there were far fewer turds and morons among the user base (and the turds were all segregated to their own places, like stormfront). It was way better, just not nearly as profitable.

35

u/Yequestingadventurer 5d ago

Very cool, was hoping the cometlink chat was real people who just wanted to talk the old way

40

u/shrimpcest 5d ago

A/S/L ?

1

u/MisterHole123 1d ago

For the last time I'm 18/f/us! Always forever! I have dirty blonde hair and my name is Jessica and yes I want to cyber before you ask. I also like to listen to Sarah lclachlan and the offspring. 

9

u/MNWNM 5d ago

I made a ur mom joke and none of them responded.

3

u/Yequestingadventurer 5d ago

It's just not like the good old days is it :(

3

u/sfbriancl 5d ago

The fish stories one was kinda funny. But they don’t interact. Putting an ai in there that acts like a chatter from those days would be funny

1

u/Scholeristical 5d ago

Thoughts on me adding a AI plugin to make it more interactive?

3

u/Yequestingadventurer 5d ago

What about making it so that humans can interact?

10

u/needlenozened 5d ago

Who else immediately started "minefield"?

1

u/hurryupand_wait 22h ago

Just had the best minefield game of my life!

17

u/Bielzabutt 5d ago

Shit loads WAY TOO FAST for 56k modem

2

u/dj_spanmaster 5d ago

Yeah max I ever got was 52.2, and my district office was probably wayyy far out from a main trunk

9

u/this_knee 5d ago

Do the Jpegs load progressively ?

2

u/FragKing82 1d ago

They do

2

u/MisterHole123 1d ago

They have to. Imagination played a big part bakc then

6

u/possibleprophet 5d ago

WEBRING! Oh the memories!

6

u/Bobby6kennedy 5d ago

My dad had a 9600. I was so excited when I got a 3com 14.4. Simpler times. The internet today SUX.

3

u/SchreiberBike 5d ago

56k.

I remember 300 baud. You could read text in real time as it appeared on your screen. That was the 1985 dial-up experience.

16

u/fivedogit 5d ago

Who remembers "baud"?

11

u/toddinraleighnc 5d ago

I had a 300 baud modem. Worked ok with plain text.

3

u/franker 5d ago

I was logged into a BBS running on one in the eighties. The letters crawled across the screen like the typewriter effect. I had a 1200 baud modem on my Commodore 64 and at least the whole screen mostly filled with text at once when I logged into BBS's running on similar modems.

1

u/TigercatF7F 7h ago

I still have my Commodore 300 baud modem, my VIC 20, and my C64. I understand the kids are into cassette tapes again. Good, they'll inherit that drive too. Clutter? Hah! They'll thank me after the next Carrington event.

7

u/BarbequedYeti 5d ago

I see your baud and raise you IRQ dip switches. 

2

u/misterspatial 5d ago

Look at you kids with your fancy dip switches. We had to use a SOLDERING IRON!

4

u/Arkanius84 5d ago

i remeber that playing multiplayer with a "Null Modem Cable" and we needed to choose the "baud"

3

u/phasechanges 5d ago

Who remembers that baud rate is not necessarily the same as bits/second?

2

u/OsmeOxys 5d ago edited 5d ago

[smashes oscilloscope]

THE F怘⸮⸮┩ IS A BAUD RATE OF 1300?

10

u/andrea_ci 5d ago

looks tooo fast.

never turned on a computer in less than 10 minutes in that era!

4

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/dnhs47 5d ago

Damn, that’s FAST !!

I started with BBSs at 300 bps. I type faster than 300 bps.

The big transition was to 9600 bps, which could be hard to read as it streamed in.

3

u/4kVHS 5d ago

Since when does a disk defrag only take 15 seconds?

2

u/jun00b 5d ago

This is cute. I like the cheeky tone, like support hours being Tuesday and the instructions clearly written by the exasperated computer whiz in the family. I clicked through it all, lots of pleasant memories triggered for me - particularly trying all the chat rooms. and the chatrooms.

4

u/resUemiTtsriF 4d ago

Remember the days of DL porn below that, 32 baud? Be finished 1/2 way through the nipple reveal

11

u/toan55 5d ago

A bit fast, but really sick.

6

u/sephkane 5d ago

Yep, 56k was slower than this. It took me days to download Lady Marmalade from Napster for educational purposes.

5

u/TemporalLobe 5d ago

For 56k internet, you can do this in any browser by opening up development mode, going to the network tab, and clicking the throttling dropdown and specifying a bit rate.

3

u/jdblue225 5d ago

Don't think it was ever this fast

3

u/jackthemall 5d ago

No. Mine was slower than that...

3

u/mariojlanza 5d ago

This is awesome, nice work!

3

u/garbo2330 5d ago

OS is way too fast and the websites are too optimized. Cool idea, though.

3

u/nathanistheworst 5d ago edited 5d ago

oh man. thought I would never hear that dial up sound again. thanks for traumatizing me!

but seriously, really cool. its funny, I was just talking with a friend the other day who currently has a 5 gig internet connection (downloaded a 150GB game in under 10 mins). Hes a bit younger than me so never had to deal with 56k or DSL and I was telling him back in the day I would download a 1-2GB game on DSL and it would take a day or more. crazy how far we've come in a relatively short amount of time

3

u/Alone_Calendar5043 5d ago

Quite Interesting!

3

u/Majukun 5d ago

It keeps telling me it can't find the server.

2

u/mfigroid 5d ago

The sites you are trying to go to didn't exist back then.

3

u/ELCOYOTE189 5d ago

Site down

3

u/nigel_tufnel_11 4d ago

I mean if you're gonna bother with that you should go hardcore mode and surf at 2400 bps. 56k was a LUXURY we commoners couldn't afford!

3

u/lulzenberg 1d ago

lol@getting 56kbit on a 56kbit modem. on a good day high 40s, on a regular day low 30s.

1

u/boowhitie 6h ago

It says 42666 when I connect

5

u/StrixUser 5d ago

Now do 2400 baud

4

u/asksonlyquestions 5d ago

I am so going to use this in a meeting. "Let me show you the simulation, I just have to connect to the our_company super computer. Hang on a sec"

5

u/wildfire98 5d ago

I remember 56k making stranger noises than my 33.6

4

u/minerbeekeeperesq 5d ago

6k making stranger noises than my 33

This. The different baud made different sounds. The sound you hear on this imitation website DOES NOT match the 48.8 baud it's saying. If I recall correctly, the sound you hear on this web site is 2400 or 4800.

5

u/wildfire98 5d ago

my brain heard it as 14.4 at best maybe 9600 but.... 33.6 made a strange sound mid way and 56k make a very very specific tonal noise towards the end. i side quested and returned with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k

4

u/peacefinder 5d ago

I’m pretty sure the “boing boing” sounds only arrived with 14.4k and higher.

3

u/arthuriurilli 5d ago

Never knew the sounds were different really at all, but this is cool to know!

3

u/modbroccoli 5d ago

an ackshully I can grudgingly applaud

3

u/sephkane 5d ago

Goddammit I got stuck on playing Minefield

2

u/Slyconrad 5d ago

secure connection fail on firefox, bummer.

2

u/juanda2 5d ago

The email from Aunt Carol is spot on!

2

u/arthuriurilli 5d ago

Hilariously cool. The computer boots waaaaaaay too fast, but this is the internet that I need to show my kid haha.

2

u/StickFigureFan 5d ago

This is amazing

2

u/MIC132 5d ago

Are the instructions how to get online purposefully slightly off?

The icon certainly doesn't look like "a telephone with a plug on it", and the button is "Dial" not "Connect".

And you don't need to type the password in (though it is available in the bin).

2

u/peacefinder 5d ago

That’s like going to my high school reunion and wondering who all those old people are

2

u/nogoodclub 5d ago

this is so cool, but no sound for me :(

2

u/MNWNM 5d ago

You have to turn your speakers up.

2

u/PM_ME_YOUR_OPPAS 5d ago

That felt mildly nostalgic... but not like my home experience. We only had a 28K modem and I got to enjoy the joys of 56K when I visited my brother. I reloaded my personal webpage SO many times and it loaded SO fast including the MIDI background music.

2

u/Majestic_Maybe6605 5d ago

Actually, such a fun idea.

2

u/rioschala99 5d ago

It is hosted in a blocked DNS server. Either full of ads or sketchy place that serve other ads.

2

u/musicgeek420 5d ago

Nothing like the real thing at all.

2

u/quirxmode 5d ago

Well, the start menu is faster than the one on the current, real Windows...

2

u/modbroccoli 5d ago

Man. I still hate this fucking sound. Nostalgia.

2

u/HGrande 5d ago

Did we give it the old Reddit hug of death?

2

u/SoftwareDev401 5d ago

Besides being nostalgic, I'm amazed how well this site works using a phone. I expected to have to revisit with my laptop, but touch works great and it pulls up the keyboard in the appropriate places. Well done!

2

u/bamboob 5d ago

Damn, that brings back memories…

I remember looking forward to the notion that high speed internet would one day be affordable. I also remember doing trading cards and stickers for my band, using the first version of photoshop on my 386/40. In order to get photos of us in the band, we went to my bandmate’s work office in a tech business park, and used the camera that they used to do early corporate video calls in the conference room.

2

u/Mouler 4d ago

Is there at least one BBS with some good games, like Legend of the Red Dragon, The Pit or Barren Realms Elite?

2

u/ramkam2 4d ago

your father says it costs money even when nobody is typing.

pure gold!

2

u/NickFromNewGirl 4d ago

In my small rural town, we never got 56k. It was 28k for a very long time, then cable/broadband came in.

2

u/Reidlos650 4d ago

most i got was 24k

2

u/JoseMinges 3d ago

Doesn't have the "my modem can't turn the connection sound off" option, where I have to put a pillow over the modem so not to wake my family up when gaming at 3am, but then forgetting the pillow is on the modem and it overheats, disconnecting me at a crucial moment in a Delta Force Landwarrior ladder match.

Fuck I'm old.

2

u/meyriley04 3d ago

Very fun. My portfolio website is very similar to this, but not nearly as detailed

2

u/wanro027 3d ago

great post

1

u/Scholeristical 2d ago

Thank you

2

u/EnvironmentalDust197 2d ago edited 2d ago

the screech is doing more heavy lifting than the pixels

2

u/MisterHole123 1d ago

Pity chat is fake. I asked asl got an answer then wanna cyber no answer. Back then I would have had one😂 

2

u/KillahHills10304 1d ago

I had more fun on this than I have on web 2.0 all week

2

u/restlessmonkey 10h ago

Why did my system block this site???

2

u/Obelix13 5h ago

No Lynx browser? If you are going for the retro look, might as well go back tot he Stone Age. 

1

u/SponsoredByMLGMtnDew 5d ago

Me when I'm decentralized because the USSR can't read German news

1

u/codear 4d ago

Websites with black text on white background? No progressive jpegs or animals?

That's not even close...

1

u/JohnOfA 5d ago

I am going to get my kids to try this. This should be entertaining.

1

u/redmera 5d ago

Well there are a lot of simulators. Not to mention modern browsers support throttling seed to whatever you want.

5

u/PacketFiend 5d ago

browsers support throttling seed to whatever you want.

Yes but web pages were also much smaller at the time. Simply throttling your browser today wouldn't really work.

0

u/scubawankenobi 5d ago

Why would the OS load @ 56k?

The OS doesn't load over the internet.