Saturday, December 15, 2018

The double edged sword of slow Internet

What is there to celebrate about a slow internet connection? Nothing at all really - we all want things as fast as possible. However, when reading an article, or trying to write this post, the speed of my connection is irrelevant.

The good old days were horrible : turn the computer on, make coffee, hope it had finally booted up, fire up the modem(internal or external), and hear the musicality of the connection tone to link up with your gateway over dial-up. The connection was slow, but you could cut out the images, the web pages were ugly, but they loaded. Video was limited to animated GIFs, and the rare webcam felt like the future was now.

Move on 25 years later, dial-up feels like an injustice and that nothing can be done without the Internet. This might as be an entry in my diary. As much as it is great to have access to large amounts of data at a high rate, there is something to be said about the benefits of a slow connection :
- more writing
- more reading
- less scrolling aimlessly
- less time in front of the screen

(So much for buying the boxed version of the game...8 hours instead of 80)