Or: A Tale Of Limited Bandwidth

I’m not sure whether I’ve blogged about this before or not, but I do some volunteering for a local chapter of the political party I belong to. One of the things I do there is system administration, which currently involves a switch from Windows to Linux. Which is why I am, right now, downloading hundreds of megabytes of uploads over a 512 kbit DSL line.

Now there’s nothing wrong with 512 kbit lines as such, I remember dialup well enough for even this to feel pretty snappy in some respects. But when you’re pulling several hundred megabytes over a line like this you do notice that the rest of the internet starts to feel slow. So as I’m on a Linux system, with Lynx installed, I decided to do a bit of browsing that way.

For those who don’t know it (though I think I’ve mentioned it before), Lynx is a console (text) based browser which, as it is text based, omits images as a matter of course. And on a somewhat stressed line getting rid of the images (90% or more of the data for most pages) speeds up browsing quite a bit. Even so it makes writing this blog entry a rather different from usual experience.

And it’s not just different, it’s also slightly nostalgic. I have no real memories of text only internet, but I do remember text only (DOS) computing, albeit without anything like the internet around at the time. Working with a black background and (mainly) light grey text does bring back memories. For that matter some elements in the interface, especially a bar with yellow text on a blue background at the bottom of the screen, make me nostalgic for Word Perfect 5.1.

I’ll end this entry here. I mainly started it to kill time while waiting for the downloads to complete, and from the look of it they’re nearly ready. Still it’s been a fun exercise in retro computing, and one I may well repeat at home.