Dial-up isn't dead. AOL still offers it.[1] There are still dial-up ISPs. There are still parts of the US with no high-speed Internet. About a quarter of US rural homes can't get a high-speed connection without buying a satellite service.
Ah, this brings back memories. Beige PC clones. The POST beep. The TURBO button. The hard drive head seek. Machinery-sounding fans. Cheap-ass 'voice' modems that used the CPU instead of giving you an entire modem in hard/firm-ware. The loooong boot times. Modem connect negotiation sounds.
What's that font on the pr.oxy/fileserver listing?
This experience was in itself, reflective of the fact that “always on” internet was not considered a necessity or normality
...and now that it is, companies are taking advantage of that to make nearly every new application phone home without your knowledge. The amount of network traffic produced on a clean install of an OS like Win10 is disturbing to see.
Aside from this, direct connections from the browsers to secure HTTPS websites was impossible due to the difference in cipher suite and SSL/TLS protocol support, so I decided to use an Asus Tinkerboard running Nginx web server to serve a miniproxy page that allows us to visit HTTPS sites and serve them back as HTTP.
You can use something like Proxomitron which uses OpenSSL in MITM mode to get TLS 1.2 and all of its newer crypto.
Another thing I miss about that era is the relative efficiency; computer hardware wasn't as powerful, but on average, software seemed to be far closer to its limits than it is today, Now, despite the increase in computing power, software feels less efficient, and it leads to some very visible comparisons. My "daily driver" machine is rather old now, but will happily do things like play 1080p video or render a complex PCB layout in 3D with resources to spare; yet struggles, straining the CPU and RAM, when loading a JS SPA whose functionality should seem to be far less demanding than the former tasks.
What I would love to build (or find someone else has already built) is a proxy that transparently serves historical versions of pages from the internet archive for projects like this one. Also don’t forget jwz mirrored the original Netscape home page at its old location @ home.mcom.com. Brings back such good memories from a time filled with wonder and positivity.
US Robotics Courier modem would be able to do 56Kbps I bet. I used it in Russia in the 90's on the shittiest landlines imaginable, it's the only one that _really_ did the job.
The problem with 56k is that it worked by having specialised hardware on the ISP end for the modulation that made those speeds possible over a phone line. As far as I know, no consumer modem can really do that, so you’re stuck with 33.6k or worse.
That was my best modem. I went from 1200 unusable to something much more usable 9600 and 14.4. Then I had the 28.8k for a few years before I was blessed with 56k. I got cable modem after that.
Reminds me of the time I had a bit of fun with the modems I had lying around in my old tech drawers. Set up a small Debian system with a modem connected to the PSTN, got mgetty running to accept incoming calls.
Finding a friend who still had a PSTN line themselves was surprisingly difficult (in Australia, we’re moving away from PSTN in favour of VoIP), but I found one.
I only managed to get a remote shell going, but if I had more time to play around with it I probably could have got PPP up and running. Having someone else on the other end for a multiplayer DOOM session over dialup would have been really cool.
So funny seeing this now. I'm sitting in a doctor's office waiting room right now for routine maintenance, and I keep hearing the fax call sounds from behind the desk. It's alive and well here.
As I recall there used to be software (installable and appliance both) that would emulate dial-up speeds and behavior when when on a high-speed connection.
[1] https://getonline.aol.com/dialup