You were lucky then. I remember it happening quite often.

I bought a Sharp mini disc when they first came our, almost £300 IIRC and wife found the receipt, not a happy bunny over that. However, what a great bit of equipment, extremely well made and excellent sound.

This has annoyed me now, what happened to the bloody thing, I never sold it.........need to find it. Its in a box,,,lots of boxes...moved house 7 times in three years before I retired

Back to the original post... it is remarkable that a 2 copper wire that essentially dates back to the dawn of telephony still provide sufficient connection for the Internet (assuming you're close enough to the exchange)

I remember reading years ago about the limits of copper, everytime they managed to increase the dialup connection speed they said it could go no higher and pretty much the same things were said when ADSL first appeared over 10 years ago.

Then again, a bit of folded metal on the roof is pretty much the same thing used from the dawn of radio and television and can now provide many many radio and television channels including some semi High Definition.

The transmission methods used are still based on the same premise when they were invented I suppose!

I'm living in the sticks (small village arse-end of nowhere) and like the fact I can stream HD tv to my laptop now and then sat in the garden.

I remember first getting dial up in about 1997. Could not believe you could download any song you wanted for free in about 15 minutes!!! (miss you original napster and if you lined up a bunch of songs you could download a whole album BEFORE YOU GOT BACK FROM WORK!!!!

Now apparently we are so conditioned to broadband that if a page doesnt load up in 4 seconds we kill it and look at something else.

I am really happy we live in the modern age.

Exact same here. It happened, but very rarely considering I used cassettes regularly for almost 20 years.

Any coincidence that I'd treated my tapes with some basic care? Not kid gloves or anything, just what you'd reasonably expect- put away in their boxes when I wasn't using them and not left lying about to pick up crumbs!

I might be wrong, but I always imagine the people complaining about cassettes jamming were the same ones who left them lying about, probably left out of their cases to melt in the car on a hot sunny day or gathering fluff after they got lost under the front passenger seat.

Yeah, can you imagine what sort of results you'd get from a vinyl LP if you treated it to comparable levels of respect? Exactly.

Only problem I really had was wow and flutter which I later found out was caused by my habit of constantly rewinding and skipping tracks, easily fixed by winding the tape from end to end.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/st_infoporn_lcds/

We have certainly hit the limits now. i remember my old US robotics courier modem, in fact I have still got it, all the screaming and bleeps when it connected, I do miss that sound even after almost 11 years when I stopped using it. i also had it updated to 56k.

when I first came onto broadband, I thought that 512kbits was great, so much faster than what I used to use, but also so much more expensive, I am glad my lodger agree to pay half, if she did not then we would not have had broadband at that time.

But have things really improved in all those years?
at that time we had no restrictions, traffic management did not exist, it was a always on unlimited system. My dial up at the time had limits, so many hours a day a day, so going to a system with no limits was great.

Now we gone back to full circle, the speed may be faster, well sometimes, but with so much traffic managment I wonder if we are really better off.

Thankfully I got a ISP that don't have any restrictions, but it have been slowing down over the last few days.


A different thing, a aerial is a aerial at the end of the day, sure they are made to receive different frequencies, but a aerial don't no the difference between a carrier wave that carries analogue info to one that carries digital info

The tech part is at the transmission source and the equipment that is receiving.

I remember when I used a CD radio years ago and I used to muck around with aerials, even making my own. I wish now I went in for HAM radio in some ways, but they seem like a load of snobs. My nephew went in for it but then never bothered with it once he got his licence.

I still use cassettes, I love the sound of them, something about them compared to the digital stuff we have now. I got a load of stuff that I got to rescue, I am going to record them back onto other cassettes. I also got a few reel tapes with stuff on, again need to rescue them, I will have to take them to my mate place and get him to do it.

I still remember downloading mp3's back in 1995 (not long after Windows 95 came out) before Napster or any of this PTP stuff. We used to have to search on FTP search engines to get what we wanted and a lot of the FTP sites were ratio sites where you had to upload something before you could download anything.

Throw in an old 56k modem that used to top out at about 3.5k a second (not 300k a second) if you were lucky you might managed to download 1 track in half an hour.

But they were good days, none of this bandwidth throttling or getting nasty letters if you downloaded too much one month.

I also had one of the first portable mp3 available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

Had a whopping 32mb of built in memory and a memory card slot to add another 32mb (if you could afford it, think I paid about £100 for it just over a year after getting the player)

I know they were around then, but as I understand it the typical computer of the time could only *just* decode an MP3 in real time (i.e. it used a very significant percentage of their total processing power).

I guess that (given increasing processor speeds) two or three years before that it might not even have been possible to play them back for most people(!)


Please take off the rose-tinted glasses- you're starting to sound like The Four Yorkshiremen! The Internet was fun back then partly because it was so new and novel.

I'm pretty confident that if you want to get your dial-up modem out today, no-one will throttle your downloads below the 56kbps your modem is capable of!

Remember to pay by the minute for your phone call (flat monthly-rate dial-up didn't exist then). Actually, remember to pay by the minute for a non-local phone call depending on where you lived, as it wasn't always possible to connect via a local (or local-rate) number circa '94-'95. Are you planning on doing this during peak-rate hours? And you still had to pay your monthly ISP subscription on top of that regardless.

I have major concerns about the way the Internet is headed (away from the free and open nature of the early service towards walled-garden crap controlled by a few major players).

But let's not mistake nostalgia for wanting everything to go back to how it was 15+ years ago.


32MB is about enough to store an hour's worth at slowish bitrates, and you couldn't change as easily as you could a cassette. (IIRC many early players used serial connections which took a horrendous amount of time to transfer data).

With such a limited amount of space, many of the theoretical benefits of MP3 (choosing and/or skipping tracks) were of limited utility- if you only have an hours' worth of space, you'll decide what you want beforehand and be unlikely to skip it.

MP3 players got popular when they did (early 2000s onwards) because that's the point that the underlying storage technology got cheap (and large) enough that they *could* offer more than cassettes/CDs did.

Before that they couldn't- an example of how a purely quantitative difference in storage size led to a qualitative difference in how they could be used.

I got one as a gift. I think it had a serial connection or something horrible, in any case it was slow as dirt to transfer just 32MB, and well, 32meg of mp3 is less than a cd unless you really lower the bitrate, so it was useless. It had horrible sound quality as well lol.