I got my first modem in 1994, a 14.4k Amigo Communion internal modem dad bought for my birthday for the princely sum of $400. I didn't know it at the time but that turned out to be a really top notch modem. Being internal meant that it had an inbuit 16550 UART which allowed it to do MNP5 and v.42bis compression nicely.
I used said modem to get on the interwebs in 1995 via Macquarie University, thanks to my cousin who was a student there at the time. I didn't really understand what the internet was about at the time, viewing it as the world's largest BBS, where I could type in 'ftp', 'o ftp.wustl.edu' or 'o ftp.cdrom.com' to grab as much share/freeware as I possibly could. I say type because everything then was done over a serial terminal commanding shells on SunOS machines (hardy and laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au; I wonder what they're running today?).
My cousin introduced me to IRC as well, and there I discovered the warez scene. The XDCC that is still used by some today existed 13 years ago! Warez & porn has always driven the hunger for bandwidth and I remember at the time that cracking machines on T1s, T3s, and OC3s were all the rage. That's 1.5Mbps, 45Mbps, and 155Mbps respectively and T1 was considered monster at the time given that most end users had just 14.4k or 28.8k dialup connections. I never imagined that I would have 1.5Mbps to my home, ever.
Fast forward to today - I have a DSL2+ link at home syncing at 21Mbps downstream. That's more than 10x the "monster" T1 connection 13 years ago, albeit with a more limited 1Mbps upstream. And with my recent 3G modem purchase I can get between 3.6 and 7.2Mbps on the move.
On a recent trip to the snow I tested this out and sitting stationary in Jindabyne I was able to get about 30kB/sec (roughly 250kbps) up and down. Moving at 90km/h coming out of Queanbeyan it was still syncing at 7.2Mbps and possible to surf the web - that's how I learnt of Hackett's silver in the 1500m, and of Usain Bolt's 9.69s world record in the 100m sprint. It soon dropped to UMTS 3.6Mbps, and then to GPRS 56k.
GPRS is slow by today's standards but it struck me how far we've come when I'm able to get 5kB/sec moving at over 100km/h in country NSW, the same 5kB/sec that was the top speed achievable by most internet users 10 years ago.
