Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Early Internet

Around the year 2000, I was serving on the board of directors for the Utah Chess Association. We were considering abolishing our state chess newsletter and making a website instead. I pointed out that most people didn't have Internet access yet, but we expected that to change. (In fact, someone had set up a chess hotline with an answering machine, where you could call the phone number to get the latest state chess news.)

It was roughly 20 years ago that I switched from using dial-up Internet to the long-anticipated cable Internet. Getting 3 Mbps was a significant improvement over the roughly 100Kbps I had.

In the early days using slow dial-up modems, like 1200 bps, you would sometimes try to load a web page and get up and do something while the page was loading. I did this all the time.  It was so bad that there were optional programs that would download pages ahead of time so that you didn't have to wait for them to load.

Twenty years ago, just a few websites had video, but because of the limited bandwidth, those videos would occupy only a tiny part of the screen and be very low resolution. Apple's video format, Quicktime, was invented to help deal with low bandwidth.

YouTube was created in 2005. The first videos were at best "Standard Definition", which means that they were low resolution. I don't remember for sure, but the first videos might have had a resolution half that of Standard Definition, or roughly 240 lines. It would take years for Internet speeds to improve so that YouTube could offer higher-resolution videos.

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