I was sent a 25mb file yesterday via SendSpace and when I went to download it, I noticed a message at the bottom of the screen that instantly sent me back to the years of…

Low-Speed Internet

Just below the download button for the file on SendSpace was this message:

Note: your download is limited to a max of 80KB/s. Click here to test a premium download and see how it would be when you use a Max account.

Upon reading it, I immediately laughed at the notion of being “limited” to 80KB/s. For me, any speed above 50KB/s is still fantastic, as I remember the not-so-distant days of dial-up Internet connections that made me happy if I received 5KB/s - and that was just 10 years ago.

When I signed up to America Online as my first Internet provider, I certainly didn’t have any idea that speeds hundreds of times faster than AOL’s 3-5KB/s would be on the horizon for home use any time soon. I was happy receiving my mass-mails filled with interesting files that were each a few megabytes in size and having to leave the connection active for hours on end, hoping it wouldn’t drop before the downloads completed.

Just trying to get that dial-up connection in the first place was always a battle, either running into busy signals or finding out I had to replace yet another 56K modem that randomly decided it no longer knew how to communicate with other modems.

But it was music to my ears whenever that 56K connection went through without any hiccups. Check out this modem emulator to relive those days of solid dial-up bliss.

I also remember getting my first Unix shell on a server attached to a T1. I was getting blazing download speeds of well over 100KB/s. It was my first entry into high-speed Internet, though I still had to then follow those high speeds with a nice, slow download from the shell onto my home computer.

Today, I suppose any transfer speed less than 200KB/s is considered slow, prompting SendSpace to refer to their free 80KB/s as “limited.” But I will always look back at the hopes of achieving a download rate of over 5KB/s and appreciate the high-speed connections that are nearly ubiquitous today.