I think it would be hard to find anyone who misses dial up.
By the way, I'm expecting an important call, so I need you to log off.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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I don't know, there is a certain nostalgia to it. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to use, but there was also the aspect where limitations breed creativity. If your time online is competing with one of the home's primary means of communication, the landline phone, the internet becomes a limited resource. It wasn't as easy to just rot on the internet as it is today. You had to be more deliberate with your time, even if that was just being more deliberate in the types of fun sites you were going to visit.
The nostalgia comes from the context that dialup involves: the early decades of the Internet, the pre-commercialization optimism about ubiquitous connectivity. Hearing the dialup sound evokes memories linked to those feelings, just like hearing music you heard in your youth evokes memories of that time.
10 millibits per second means that a single bit would take over a minute and a half to transmit. That's so much slower than dial-up! I'd much rather have at least a 10 Mbps connection.
Your comment is so pedantic and dorky and I love it
I take my job very seriously
the united states. from any era.
It's always been good for the slave owners and not so much for everyone else in the world, lol. What a cancer.
This hugely misses a certain 'golden age' that took place from about the mid-30's to the mid-70's, in which 1) The New Deal, 2) helping to save the day in WWII, and 3) the postwar boom created a situation in which America was envied, social safety nets abounded, and a good life could be had even on fairly humble salaries.
That said, the revolutionary war is not really the glorious event most Americans think it is, and the fact that a Civil War was necessary in the first place is deeply troubling and shameful. And of course, black & minority rights during most of the 'golden age' were indeed a point of embarrassment.
It has never changed. It just stopped hiding the truth.
I cannot decipher this title.
I also had to read it half a dozen times before I realized it wasn't my reading comprehension that was the problem. "What's something people believe was good for its time, that was actually terrible, even back then?" is maybe a more coherent version.
I'm not sure I have a decent example I can think of though.
Temu TikTok Beanie Babies Minidisc
A lot of TV shows and movies from franchises still running. There's a huge amount of nostalgia attached to them, but there's plenty out there now that are just as good if not better.
It's hard not to be biased when humans have built-in rose tinted glasses though.
Likewise, rebooting every successful series from the 80s and 90s for the same reason.
I don’t think anyone thinks dial-up was good.
Exactly, if you wanted the Internet, you got dial up. If you want to cross the ocean, do you want to travel by boat or by bicycle? A plane would be faster, but if I only have a boat I'll take it.
Cocaine wasn't any better in the 80s.
You just don't start doing the fenty fold randomly in the streets. But beside that is the same crap.
Personally I believe we'd all be better off if the Internet never existed.