Many people who are new to the Internet take a high-speed Internet connection for granted. The bottom line is that being able to access websites as quickly and efficiently as possible now hasn’t always been the case. When the World Wide Web was just beginning, virtually everyone who connected to it from home used a dial-up connection.
To say that it was slow, tedious and always dropped the connection would be an understatement. Every time he cut it off, he was forced to dial once again, for a few minutes until he was finally connected again and allowed to log in. This process can take anywhere from one to five minutes, depending on how your Internet Service Provider is operating that day.
After doing that, he could be online for five minutes to an hour, and he would be interrupted once again. If he wanted to stay on the Internet, he was forced to try connecting again. The high-speed Internet connections that most of us have today are extremely reliable and rarely lose their connections.
High-speed Internet connections were available when dial-up connection was so popular, but they were very expensive. About the only types of places that could afford them were Internet-related businesses, colleges and universities, and other types of large organizations that used the World Wide Web extensively.
Today’s high-speed Internet connections have also made all kinds of websites very popular, which would be impossible without them. An example of one of these sites would be YouTube. It is a site where people can post videos that they have created and view videos that other people have placed on the site.
Back when the Internet was much slower than it is today, going to a site that had a lot of images or graphics could be a terrible experience. Some of them loaded so slowly, that if you weren’t a very patient person, you might forget about being a regular visitor to one of these types of websites.
So the next time you’re complaining about your high-speed Internet connection, you have no idea what it was like when all you could use was dial-up. You really should be thankful for what you have now, because the alternative was unacceptable.
