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| Author | That long lost internet dial up connection. (Read 44936 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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wove
1024 MB  Posts: 1363 
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on: August 11, 2025, 20:15
This is from Daring Fireball's post today. Here is what Gruber had to say about AOL closing down dialup connection. "So we knew that even the fastest dial-up connection was painfully slow. But we made do. Software was designed to treat bandwidth — each and every request — as a precious, limited resource. It was a deliberate choice, by you, the user, to “go online” to, say, check and send email. Developers took pains to make their apps as small as possible, because downloading even a few megabytes could take a while. Websites eschewed bloat, because if a website was bloated, no one would bother going there. In some ways, overall, things were better because the technology was so much worse. My nostalgia for that era is quite profound — exemplified, of course, by my Pavlovian affection for the distinctive grating sound of a modem initiating its connection." I certainly recall the odd cacophony of sounds when dialing in and connecting via modem. I do also miss the days when web sites made a big effort to keep things as small and light weight as possible. I enjoyed the view that the internet was better because technology was worse. |
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: August 12, 2025, 19:45
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@wove -Thanks for sharing that interesting weblog. I miss those days -every single day. Lost interest in ‘modern’ software years ago. Back in the late 90’s, I received a 1.45MB Zip file on Hotline from an acquaintance in Ireland. He got it from one of his friends working at Microsoft. When I extracted the file, it turned out to be Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Server, or v5.0 -can’t recall, but extracted it was over 500MB in size -almost fit a double sided 1.44MB floppy disk compressed. Apparently Microsoft was working on some new proprietary compression algorithms. Wild to see it all started way back in 1952 by Huffman. Years later iterations upon iterations to the enhanced implementation of LZ78 in 1978, to the Lempel–Ziv–Welch released in 1984, and so forth.
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jojo2k
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4 MB Posts: 4 OS 9 Spy
Reply #2 on: August 13, 2025, 01:01
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@Cashed What?  ? That's a huge size difference...If only modern devs followed such principles today, the newest Call of Duty games may have only been 100 GB instead of their usual 300 GB or so these days lol
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #3 on: August 14, 2025, 02:21
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As awestruck today, as I was back then. Repacks then and later were super compressed, but this one -simply blew off the charts. I looked up the addresses I've lived at, it was in 1999, and I'm quite certain it was version 5 -It took an hour to unpack. At that time I was buying new PC Magazine issues every month, I phoned one of them and sent them the file. They used to manage squeezing 800MB into a 64MB cartridge -also impressive. Yo @jojo2k I dig your radio station and music!  Another radio enthusiast shared this with me. RadioLab's MIXTAPE Series -need sub to listen to the podcasts. YouTube got em. Episode 4, is about 'Pirate Radio' -sharing way before the internet. Episode 1, is about sharing music 
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #4 on: August 14, 2025, 18:15
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Quote from: “Cashed” When I extracted the file, it turned out to be Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Server, or v5.0 -can’t recall, but extracted it was over 500MB in size -almost fit a double sided 1.44MB floppy disk Do you happen to have a link to that compression scheme? I have been tossing it around for the last day or so and I have had no luck understanding how that much compression is even possible.
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #5 on: August 15, 2025, 03:10
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That’s a perfectly logical, understandable, and a really fair question @wove -I still don’t get it. I don’t think it was another ’Sloot Digital Coding System’ myth -as I saw this one myself. I was busy starting up my first company, offering custom built PC’s and upgrades. One company that I landed a deal with required that I got another techie onboard. I remember showing him and he just brushed it off, saying “oh that’s easy, as it has no images,” and some more hacker slang babble, and I was like hmm -no way. I might have sent him a copy -can’t recall. Back then, with all the piracy going on, it did make sense to me, that if it was a new algorithm -it was kept secret. The easiest evidence would have been if I had kept the file -which I’m sure is gone. It wasn’t Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 1, that one is only 1.63MB -and it wouldn’t have taken an hour to unpack and be 500+ in size. So I took to the net. Microsoft Research - Technical Report 2000-96 (MSR-TR-2000-96) User Benefits of Non-Linear Time Compression In that report they mention a “Mach1 algorithm” and a “Adapt algorithm”. “Since Mach1 is, to our knowledge, the best adaptive time compression technique, the algorithm used in our adaptive time compression condition is based on it. The Mach1 executable was not available to us, so we could not use it directly.” But they are talking about Time-compression for audio-video content. I’ll have to dig deeper, these all have link rot, that I’ll have to manually fix. The following link is only linked temporarily -@wove please let me know when you’ve read my reply so I can remove the link again. [ thumbs up ] -thanks. David William Plummer, the engineer who developed Task Manager and the copy protection mechanism for Windows, runs a YouTube channel called Dave’s Garage. That Microsoft was interested in compression algorithms is evident when watching his video about his VisualZip app -that Microsoft bought. I doubt the magazine ever published an article about it. Firstly because it was ‘warez’, and secondly, they’d need confirmation from Microsoft. The good news is, the magazine is still around. To try solving this mystery, these are the options available: I will reach out to David and ask him. I will reach out to the magazine and ask them. I will try locating that techie that assisted me. I will try locating the one who sent me the file originally. His pseudonym was ‘ArchAngel’ -IIRC. I will try locating the file. It'll take some time -but I’m as interested in this as you, and maybe others are.
Last Edit: August 15, 2025, 04:40 by Cashed
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #6 on: August 15, 2025, 04:34
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I just realized something. He told me he got it from a friend working at Microsoft, but it could have been just a prank. I saw the NT logo and the installer window with the Setup Wizard, even clicked next -but never installed it. What if, a ‘Time-compression’ was used on the zip file -a timer set for an hour long ‘unzipping’ duration -and a folder showing 500MB+ size in properties afterwards. That makes way more sense to me, if that’s possible -but anything with data and coding is possible. Will however do a follow up -I always stumble over something interesting when digging.
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #7 on: August 19, 2025, 02:26
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Moved the '1.45MB zip to 500MB mystery' question to a new tread on another forum. Never meant to hijack your original topic @wove. The tiny file sizes of Macintosh applications truly fascinates me -every single day.
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