how we used to do it

Broadband celebrates it’s tenth birthday! It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since we were running businesses and buying on-line via those toe-curlingly slow whistling, humming, clicking 56kb dial-up modems. And yet in the day we were so impressed! A few years earlier I’d brought a fax machine that had the impressive go faster stripe on the side saying ‘all data transmitted at ultra-fast 9600bauds a minute (that is 9.6kb). A page of A4 text every 40 seconds – zipperty do da. We really thought we were cooking on gas. Despite Steve Job’s best efforts, people still hanker for technology that feels comfortable – hence the delightfully retro ‘dialler’ app for the iPhone. No doubt someone is designing a typewriter iPhone app with full carriage return so that we can send text messages the old fashioned way.

Mapping the Internet

When I began as an IT adviser at Business Link in 2001, most Somerset businesses were struggling to manage their ecommerce websites with a 28.8 or, at best, 56kbs line. The lucky few had ISDN. Connection speeds were painfully slow, but most web developers accepted it philosophically. When the Asymmetric digital subscriber line system (ADSL) was developed by BT, the thinking at the time was that most customers would need an Asymmetric service more than a symmetrical one.  But of course YouTube and online data back-up services have shown us that we push as much content onto the web as we pull down. We still have a long way to go but the global brain is rapidly developing. The BBC news website shows just how far we have progressed in eight years.