SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

The retro hardware side of things came up as a side-effect, but grew to be the main area of discussion.

That'd be starting around 2008 IIRC. That's around when i've rebuilt my 486 and showed it off here (because I tried to do weird things like put a Voodoo2 12MB in there)

can anyone post all countries from here?
https://share.similarweb.com/sharePost?params … W9ncmFwaHkifQ==

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-19, 05:42:

SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

The retro hardware side of things came up as a side-effect, but grew to be the main area of discussion.

That'd be starting around 2008 IIRC. That's around when i've rebuilt my 486 and showed it off here (because I tried to do weird things like put a Voodoo2 12MB in there)

I was looking in in "Ancient times" trying to get clues for getting older V1 and V2 games going on Voodoo3, not sure if I made an account way back then or not, but I was mostly hanging around loosely associated communities on bravenet. Then I sorta lurked once in a while for the odd clue here and there on things. The "messing around with old junk" urge kicked in every so often, and I was delighted the hardware section took off, there was nowhere that cared much for 90s PCs, so when it started getting quite lively here, coinciding with my circling back to old hardware again I signed up. VCFED was mostly 70s and early 80s back then, I hear they tolerate 486es these days.

Everyone who wants to be here is here. No further thought necessary on this subject.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2024-09-19, 15:36:

Everyone who wants to be here is here. No further thought necessary on this subject.

This forum is very international as forums go.

Yes it’s rare to see non-English languages here but I assume folks would find a post in another language more interesting than offensive if someone wants to post that way.

It’s honestly somewhat disappointing for me being US centric having difficulty engaging with many native Japanese forums and marketplaces. (Lots of cool stuff there if I was better at handling foreign languages)

Ah well

386SX wrote on 2024-09-17, 11:41:

I also don't use translator while English is not clearly my first language but I usually do my best to write as fast as I can even with some errors that I usually find later reading my own messages a second time later. 😀

But this forum helps me a lot to have an opportunity to give opinions in English I'd not have in real life easily in a subject like retro hardware I really like.

Honestly I’m glad to see overseas folks post, we usually understand the non-native speakers better than a few of the natives.

Several YouTube channels I follow are a non-native speaking in English while many times being self taught, makes me feel bad I lack language skills.

I'd completely forgot about VDMSound hahaha, fair point!

Needless to say, we've come a long way baby.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-19, 04:39:

Dial-up BBS using Telix or similar software existed before Win95 but were only popular among a small group of enthusiasts. As I wrote in the previous post, TANet was the first TCP/IP ISP available in Taiwan, and college boys in EE or CS majors soon created many not-so-academic BBS for recreational and social purposes. In fact PTT was a late boomer in BBS culture: it was far behind NTU Royal Palm Blvd until late 90s-early 00s, when NTU started to evict one-night-stand seekers using the taxpayer-sponsored BBS. Other departmental BBS slowly died down and more and more netizens moved to PTT. It was sort of similar to CoupuServe and AOL.

We didn't have a direct DOS/V equivalent in DOS era; most people used ETen Chinese System, a wrapper (not a full-fledged OS) that enabled DOS to display and input Big5 characters. Those ASCII art were popular under DOS and, with broadband ISP were not that common until the 21st century, telnet-based BBS were still popular for low bandwidth requirement and real-time response (very useful in chats, as opposed to HTML-based web pages were actually working in offline mode). In modern days many netizens with zero knowledge of telnet would simply install a browser plugin or smartphone app to emulate telnet experience.

Interesting... thanks for the details! Then I suppose things like IBM's Chinese-Traditional DOS [e.g. PC-DOS 2000] came too late to compete with the ETen/Big5 system, and/or just weren't used much? There was apparently at least one version of that before the '2000' one IIRC, but that was the DOS/V equivalent I was thinking about.

VileR wrote on 2024-09-20, 12:33:

Interesting... thanks for the details! Then I suppose things like IBM's Chinese-Traditional DOS [e.g. PC-DOS 2000] came too late to compete with the ETen/Big5 system, and/or just weren't used much? There was apparently at least one version of that before the '2000' one IIRC, but that was the DOS/V equivalent I was thinking about.

PC-DOS 2000 Trad. Chinese / Simp. Chinese / Korean versions were based on DOS/V core with different font modules (so yes, that was a true DOS/V equivalent). IBM even provided emulator / wrapper for software designed to work under ETen.

The biggest problem was its release date: I bought my last ETen "ET2000" in 1995 and was forced to sell it to a friend with discount after confirming it was incompatible with my S3 86C968 chip (but it was compatible with 868 and 928); guess when was PC-DOS 2000 Chinese versions (I haven't confirmed the exact date of the Korean version) released?

May 30, 1998.

That was two weeks after the release of Windows 98. 😅

At that time, novices started learning computers straight with Win95, while veterans already had accumulated knowledge and software on DOS, ETen, as well as Win95; Japanese DOS/V was only circulated among a very small group of Japanese game (usually 18+) fans. So the sales of PC-DOS 2000 dropped like a lead balloon.

Heck, ETen was already struggling to find new ways to survive after taking a great blow from localized Win95. They successfully found a niched market: pager / PDA with subscription services dedicated to stock market investors (傳訊王, with English brand name "InterMessenger") in 1997. Those products enabled ETen to enjoy another decade of prosperity before the rise of smartphones.

It provided functions like (only red, bold titles translated):

• Personal paging
• Real-time stock market quotes
• Foreign currency exchange quotes
• Futures quotes
• Real-time news
• Weather forecast
• Traffics
• Sports/Entertainment news
• Personal data administration
• Itineraries and appointments
• To-do lists
• Calculator
• Electronic dictionary

Monthly subscription fee: NT$200 for basic news, NT$800 for stock markets add-on.

References:
https://osctc.blogspot.com/2020/04/pc-dos-2000.html
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1WW41177W3/
http://sna.csie.ndhu.edu.tw/~cnyang/mobile/sld187.htm

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

I was on dialup until 2016.

The 90’s from an economic standpoint was the best the US had for normal people in recent times with very high employment .

Despite this many people really couldn’t afford a PC in the 90’s either going into debt for a purchase of a lifetime (so they thought) or buying at the bottom edge of semi obsolete technology. The US has much more “easy money “ on offer to lend than the Euro zone.

The 70’s and 80’s had a lot of problems compared to directly during the boom after WWII. And the 90’s were the last blip before stock market only and jobless recoveries.

The 2ks has been the US version of the lost decades with a much slower conversion of college grads into jobs in their field. Much lower college rates amongst men and much lower rates of “household formation “ and paid off homes owned and lived in by the home owner(s).

Stocks going up and good economic measurements has ignored the lowest common denominator that has seen wages and hours not keep pace with 2 decades of inflation. In the 50’s and 60’s you pretty much were guaranteed a job when you left home and it was stable, that is a far cry from mostly part time and service jobs available to a new grad today

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

If you Britons / Western Europeans felt "poor" when compared with US in the 90s, I wonder what adjective could be used to describe contemporary East Asian "geese" in four tiers? 😅

1. Japan (the only one comparable to Western Europe back then)
2. Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan
3. Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Thailand
4. China

There was a time when landline telephones were considered as luxury items. 😅 They got rid of luxurious tags and became universal home appliance in 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s by the four tiers, respectively. I just learned a few months ago that some Chinese kids in rural inland areas (as opposed to coastal metropolises) still played Subor / Xiaobawang (an unlicensed "famiclone") on B/W TV sets as late as early 2000s.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:11:

The 90’s from an economic standpoint was the best the US had for normal people in recent times with very high employment .

The decade between the fall of USSR until 9/11 attacks. The brightest moments of US history (sigh).

As a western european, I don't quite agree with the picture presented by Almoststew1990. I was a student in the early 90s, living from jobs and not living at home. I did have a profound interest in computers and went through 286, 386, 486, with a color matrix printer and a multifrequency display (all new). Even I could afford it. But for most households, there was just no profound interest in a full computer. What for?

The thread's getting better on page three... 😀

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-19, 05:42:

SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

The retro hardware side of things came up as a side-effect, but grew to be the main area of discussion.

That'd be starting around 2008 IIRC. That's around when i've rebuilt my 486 and showed it off here (because I tried to do weird things like put a Voodoo2 12MB in there)

I can vaguely remember that I already knew VOGONS in the 2000s, but it wasn't very interesting for me...in the early 2010s it became more important to me, especially when I started my retro/vintage computer website in 2013 - and this happened because VOGONS became an international place for all this 80s/90s/00s retro/vintage computer hardware/software stuff. My website got some backlinks from here...I noticed...watched...and some years later I felt like I had to create an account. I like to help others solving their problems and did that before in some German PC/hardware forums.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-19, 16:52:

386SX wrote on 2024-09-17, 11:41:

I also don't use translator while English is not clearly my first language but I usually do my best to write as fast as I can even with some errors that I usually find later reading my own messages a second time later. 😀

But this forum helps me a lot to have an opportunity to give opinions in English I'd not have in real life easily in a subject like retro hardware I really like.

Honestly I’m glad to see overseas folks post, we usually understand the non-native speakers better than a few of the natives.

Several YouTube channels I follow are a non-native speaking in English while many times being self taught, makes me feel bad I lack language skills.

I'm also not a native speaker...but I like it, because so I can train my English on a regular basis...and English is the language to get in touch with many people around the world. Spanish or Chinese are other ones, but I won't learn them in this life, especially the latter. I also had French in school, but I'm happy if I understand some simple phrases if I read them. Often I have to look up words German <-> English to be sure, but I think my English is quite OK (reading > writing > listening > speaking). BTW my browser's (New Moon 28 by roytam1) language is English which has the advantage of additional training and English spellchecker (beneficial when writing here).

Funny, I recall a citation I've read somewhere:
"English, naturally enough, is the language of England. "U.S. English" is either a locale-based variant or a collection of spelling mistakes."

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

Though I had some/little PC experience before since the very early 90s, we had no own PC. I could get my parents to buy a mediocre PC in late 1998 (K6-2 333, ATI Rage IIc, 64 MB RAM, 4,3 GB HDD). It cost ~2,200 DM which was pretty much back then for something what your son want to have and you don't really know what it is good for (except gaming) while you were happy to still have a job in East Germany after German reunification.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:11:

I was on dialup until 2016.

56k until 2016 or what do you mean with dialup. It was still possible here until some years ago (when they switched to VOIP only), but unusable since before 2010, considering "modern" websites.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:27:

There was a time when landline telephones were considered as luxury items. 😅 They got rid of luxurious tags and became universal home appliance in 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s by the four tiers, respectively.

We - situated in East Germany - got telephone in 1993, before that we had to go to a callbox if we wanted to reach someone via telephone (on a callbox 🤣) and until the sewer was constructed in 1997/8 we had a pit latrine, you can't tell anyone born after 2000. But it was OK or even good - money and prosperity doesn't make you happy.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:27:

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:11:

The 90’s from an economic standpoint was the best the US had for normal people in recent times with very high employment .

The decade between the fall of USSR until 9/11 attacks. The brightest moments of US history (sigh).

The later 90s were great in some way...80s had great music and movements, but were depressed, widely based on self-destruction (remember "No Future!")...the 90s exploded into a great party in it's climax at the end of the decade. We thought everything is possible, the world is getting better, but 9/11 (and so many things afterwards, but also before like Balkan wars) told us we were young, dumb and wrong...unfortunately, very unfortunately. I have tears in my eyes thinking about what the world is today and what our dreams were back then...we have failed, maybe like every generation since the 1960s.

kind regards
soggi

hmm..

While not infamous like East Germany, I live in one of the least glamorous parts of the central USA. (Often referred to surreptitiously as "Flyover Country", because flights fly over the top of it, and nobody wants to have connecting flights, or worse, to drive here. Climate wise, it is very similar to Ukraine, or so i've been told, but I cant imagine Ukraine getting as hot there as it does here in the summers. The Russian red wheat does well here though, and it's where all the anabaptist refugees from the holodomor settled-- as well as, strangely, some swedish people out west of here... ) The countryside is not terribly photogenic, and is even referred to as "Depressing" by many people.

It's worse than that though, as I live in a podunk town of about 600 people, on top of it all. It's a half-hour drive to the nearest large-ish city (over 100k people). One way.
On top of that, I find that I am one of the very rare people who have a tech inclination. more than 9/10 people I talk to have precisely 0 interest in it, aside from wanting me to fix something for them. 😁
Interestingly enough though, a local rural ISP has started offering fiber broadband out here (and it's NOT google's). I just havent gotten around to switching.

As for my history-- Back when tech was more new as a concept, (60s through 90s), there were some chip fabs south of here, 2 states down. Texas Instruments was famously situated in Texas (naturally), and there was an LSI complex in the nearby large-ish metro area. (The building is now owned by Netapp, and used as a call center and R&D building)-- and so it was not *that* uncommon to find tech heads here. I cut teeth in the early to late 90s, and grew up with DOS PCs, but most of my tech-head peers grew up with various micros, like the TI-99A. I worked for a mom&pop computer outlet store during that period, which was run by a weed smoking shyster, but I have fond memories of that era. I picked up a lot of fancy tricks for retro machines there. Sadly, the techbubble bursting kinda killed a lot of the stuff this way, concentrating all the remaining industry in places like Silicon Valley; These days, industry thinks that there simply isn't talent out this way. They are wrong, of course, but try telling THEM that. There arent very many of us left out here, but the ones that do exist, tend to be pretty damn good.

I too miss those days. Too much is devoted to using computing and technology in all the wrong ways today. Apparently, the people with money just cant seem to learn their lessons about misusing technology, or about running schemes to try and get rich quick. The degree to which data gets warehoused these days astounds me, and the ways that it gets demanded for every little thing, sickens me.

Anymore though, it's like I've been in a funk, sunken into an almost "Morlok" like groove. I find I have more pleasure doing maintenance and repair on old machines than I do actually playing with them in the intended ways.
Probably a side effect of doing too much free tech support. 🙁 I'm half-heartedly wondering when I'll start hungering for human flesh, and grow troll like hair all over. (phht!)

I kinda wish that there was an enthusiast group I could attend or something, but nothing out this way for people in my epoch-- the dos PC era was not well known for producing "enthusiasts"...

Vogons seems to do well though.

@soggi We had a similar situation over here in W.-Germany back then.
While our telephone system wasn't as broken as yours and didn't use steel wire as a substitute to copper wire, it wasn't really prepared for the future, either. 🙁

There were earlier attempts at digitizing (optical fibre etc) and expanding the telephone exchanges in the early-mid 80s, but externally, the landlines weren't expanded enough.
They weren't being planned with such a high population in mind, I mean. It could easily happen that you had to wait for months (in the 90s!) to get a telephone connection here in the (former) golden west.

Back then, I vaguely remember, the stationed US personnel and their relatives were a bit mad about the situation, too. They had to wait for ages to get a telephone over here.
Which probably was worse to them than to us, because they had a real need to phone back home on a regular basis.

That being said, the Telekom AG had some real fun back in the early-mid 90s at modernizing the former E.-Germany telephone infrastructure..
I remember how eager it was to get you optical fibre, satellite links, ISDN and such things.

After it did overcome the first shock about how poor condition of the existing phone network was, I mean. 😁
Their old-school BTX service didn't really work in the east, not even at cozy 1200 Baud using the venerable DBT-03 modem.

That's why it happens to happen that some of the locations over here in the west have worse telephone infrastructure sometimes.
We didn't get new cabling back in the 90s, but have to get along with cables installed in the 1950s or 1960s.
Some older lines aren't even twisted-pair, but rather something more like ordinary loudspeaker wire.
This had caused issues with DSL, originally, I vaguely remember.

Edit: A bit more about fibre and ISDN.. Originally, in the 1970s, it was planned by our postal minister that we get optical fibre cable, eventually.
However, the money was used for cable TV, eventually. So we never got hi-tech telecommunications here in the West Germany.

The Bundespost and its successor, Telekom AG, then tried to deploy ISDN as a modern communications medium in the early-mid 90s.
The PC DOS/Amiga games Telekommando and Telekommando 2 might give an idea about this "dream" or road-map (they were "Werbespiele", after all).

Unfortunately, the old optical fibre of ISDN had been superseded by copper-based DSL technology by early 2000s.
Some exiting optical fibres had been removed, even, because they were seen as being obsolete.

What hurts, though, is that the fibres itself weren't poor. Their bandwidth was alright.
It merely were the interface boxes at the ends, the transceivers - and they were always designed to be modular, removable. With upgrades in mind.
The existing fibre could have been saved, thus, in theory. Very sad. And now we have to wait for another 10-20 years until we get optical fibre (again). Sigh.

Edit: If this interests you, you can read a bit about Datex-P, if you like. It was the commercial, X.25 service by the Deutsche Bundespost over here.
It was around since late 1970s and provided computer connections to all over the world, before the internet was around. ISDN also was related to Datex-P.

Edit: You're right about the euphoria in the 90s, I think. My family and me felt similar, at least. We were happily anticipating the new millennium.
What's a bit depressing in hindsight, though.: It wasn't just an illusion, maybe. After fall of iron curtain and end of cold war, there was a possibility of world peace.
There also was a feeling for the needs of mother nature and protecting the planet. In the 90s, it was all about saving the rain forest and fixing the ozone hole.
This was a continuation from the 80s, which was about saving the whales, maybe. Did you also use recycling paper in school, by any chance? 😀

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-25, 21:27:

I just learned a few months ago that some Chinese kids in rural inland areas (as opposed to coastal metropolises) still played Subor / Xiaobawang (an unlicensed "famiclone") on B/W TV sets as late as early 2000s.

Reminds me a bit of my own youth. I had both a NES/SNES in the 90s and played on a Commodore 1702 video monitor (via AV cables).
Other kids, however, might also have had used a classic TV with RF connection or a then-new SCART TV (a TV with EuroAV).

I suppose it did depend on the situation. It wasn't too uncommon back then that kids got the old TV in the house.
Which either could have been an old, boxy color TV from the 80s or a little black/white 13"portable TV.

These b/w portables had been very popular in East Germany of the 80s, by the way. Junost is a negative prime example, maybe. 😉
In West Germany of the 80s, kids and hobbyists had not seldomly used these portables for hooking up their C64s or other homecomputers.

So it makes sense that Chinese kids had a b/w TV by late 90s, still. 10 years aren't much in rural areas, I suppose.
Time flows slower there. Changes and new developments take a while until they reach them.

Anyway, these Famiclones are neat. Some are cheaply made, but the electronics are fascinating.Some clone chips are very good copies of the NES chipset, even pin compatible.
The Russians essentially had grown up with Famiclones in the 90s through the Dendy, also.

Which is kinda confusing, sometimes. In the US, in the 90s, the NES was considered obsolete and end of life, while Russia just started to experience it.
And Here in Europe, in mid-90s, the NES was technically outdated, but still seen as a *regular, non-vintage games console.

You got late titles like Kirby's Adventure, Lion King, Aladdin or Smurfs being sold new in stores.
Next to SNES, MegaDrive games. And N64 games, by 1996. That was the last time I bought a new NES game.

*A bit like the Sega Master System was, maybe. The Sega Master System 2 still sold quite well in the early 90s.
(In another place, in Brazil, the company Tectoy had sold Sega consoles for a looong time, as well.)

@wierd_w Thank you a lot for sharing your story! I didn't know what a "flyover country" was, for example and learned something new.
I also hope that the optical fibre connection will be available to you. Fibre has a lot of potential and won't become obsolete soon.
Maybe it will change things for the better to you and your neighborhood! 😀 👍

Jo22 wrote on 2024-09-26, 08:14:

That's why it happens to happen that some of the locations over here in the west have worse telephone infrastructure sometimes. […]
Show full quote

That's why it happens to happen that some of the locations over here in the west have worse telephone infrastructure sometimes.
We didn't get new cabling back in the 90s, but have to get along with cables installed in the 1950s or 1960s.
Some older lines aren't even twisted-pair, but rather something more like ordinary loudspeaker wire.
This had caused issues with DSL, originally, I vaguely remember.

There's a bit of an odd situation in my particular neighbourhood with that. Copper got done just late enough in the 60s or 70s that it wasn't on the upgrade schedule, in 80s and 90s. It didn't get done with very good stuff then, and it was mostly laid shallow underground, and has been under attack by rosebush and fencepost ever since. However, the 25ish year window when they would have refreshed the copper fell after the push was for digital infrastructure, but the priorities were assigned different, due to how population had skewed and trying to wire it near densest probable customers outward. Now compounding this, was that there used to be several small town areas that all grew into each other and amalgamated, and they all had their own exchange. I could climb on top of my building and with a mighty heave, just about hit the old exchange with a stone. However, when they amalgamated the exchanges, did they use straightline point to point from old to new? They did not, so the trunk goes in a big dogleg to another old exchange before it goes to the "new" central one.

So there's a good 5 miles of copper length plus the rotten old crap in the few blocks around. Anyway, that meant DSL here kinda sucked at 1.5Mbit and people 10 mins walk away were getting 6-10Mbit. So when they rolled out fibre to the pole they did us first right? No. Just about last in the city, at 7 or 8 years ago. However they had fibre to neighbourhood 5 years before that, which cut out the 5 miles of attenuation, but since it went through horrible street level copper, did not improve speeds much. So I can get fibre on the pole right? Hahahaaa... only if I buy the huge premium TV and internet bundle at nearly $300 a month and then I get hundreds of channels and hundreds of megabits. The transceiver expenses seem high or they're trying to keep profits up or something. The medium packages are 25Mbit, which sounds suspiciously like their "up to" speed on FTN, not pole. They get all weasel wordy when I try to pin them down on the exact kind of connection. So yeah I figure I'm getting 1.5Mbit if I sign up for that... maybe 3 if there's better encoding. Adding insult to injury, they just put gigabits maybe tera or petabits of new fibre trunk along the nearest arterial road, that I could also hit with a stone from my roof.

All that is "the phone company" and applies to any 3rd party resellers that sell that connection. I have to use the "cable TV company" infrastructure which is a pain in the butt for being shared bus kinda deal and lagging in the evenings, but it's the only way I can get reasonably fast hookup. Still though, walk a few mins in any direction and they get much better options. I am waiting for "the next big thing" at the phone company side to push the fibre at pole hookup off the premium pricing spot, or competition maybe from cheap 5G at home, or starlink, or the cable co rolling out a connection twice as fast or something. Though I have itchy feet, want to move from current 3rd party reseller, because the one I was on got bought out and the one that bought them has central servers way far away from here in Montreal rather than Toronto, so there are non-local slowdowns and flakes because of that. Plus pages keep defaulting to French because of Montreal ISP.

There was nearly a third option, our local government got interested in municipal broadband, but a little late, this transitioned to municipal wifi which got going "some" around downtown core, and I haven't heard crap about it for years and don't know if it even works still downtown. I was hoping it would at least creep up to the edge of the lowish valley that it sits in, then I could probably have got line of sight with a pringles can.

Anyway, not all sunshine and roses in populous parts of Ontario, some dim spots.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2024-09-25, 20:33:

This does bring up one interesting topic though - for those of you in the US, I don't think you realise how 'rich' you were in the 90s! When I see LGR videos of computers costing thousands of dollars and all the weird peripherals costing $100 or more (30 years ago), I do wonder if you guys know what the european experience(s) was like back then, with how late we got the first 'family PC' and how late broadband came in. The idea of that corner PC "A PC for the kitchen" or an internet appliance in the late 90s is wild to me as something people would have disposable income for, after funding a main PC etc, is wild to me. And I am speaking as someone from the UK, let alone eastern europe which would have been on different level.

Part of it, I think, is that in the mid-1990s in North America, if not a teeny bit earlier, it became expected to have home computers for kids in school. Certainly teachers here by 1994-5 or so seemed to expect at least some things to be done typed. My class had like... 3 people... without home computers and there were a couple DOS machines in the classroom with WP 5.1 they could use. So, if you were a parent, you bit the bullet, got out the credit card, and got the first family PC (or Mac Performa) with the inkjet printer.

The other thing that drove interest in home computers, as quaint as this now sounds in 2024, was the CD-ROM encyclopedia. Prior to the CD-ROM encylopedia, you were heading to the public library half-regularly for all kinds of school work just to consult a paper encyclopedia. CD-ROM encyclopedia meant the same thing could be done without leaving home, a huge time saver for parents. Or you were spending big money for a printed encyclopedia set at home - the cost of that probably made computers look cheap.

I would note that this was all pre-Internet, people started to play around with dial-up in 1996-7. Americans were probably 'online' before Canadians thanks to things like unlimited AOL; there were no comparably-priced services in Canada that I remember. But that meant most computers had modems which made the leap to accessing the Internet rather easy.

Meanwhile, when I was in France in 1997, almost no one had home computers, and I'm pretty sure teachers there were expecting handwritten work to be handed in. Knowing how conservative teachers there could be, wouldn't be surprised if they'd be upset getting something typed instead. In France at least, I think mainstream home computers only became a thing in the later 1990s as they woke up and were like 'OMG the anglosaxons are way ahead of us on this Internet thing'. In two months spent there over the summer, not a single person my family visited had Internet access - my mom had one techie friend (who had in fact spent a lot of time in North America before moving back), and his hardware had gotten fried in a lightning strike the week before, and everybody else had basically never heard of the Internet. Minitel country, it still was. (And it's worth noting, Minitel was a lot cooler than anything in Canada in the early 1990s... but it caused them to be very behind on PCs, TCP/IP, the web, etc)

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 15:45:

The other thing that drove interest in home computers, as quaint as this now sounds in 2024, was the CD-ROM encyclopedia.

Seconded. The late 1990s and Win9x were the heyday of e-books on CD-ROM. Just about every new computer has a disc of encyclopedia and many other e-books plus a few games bundled. While traditional encyclopedias on paper had a more amount of raw text, they couldn't compete with audio and video contents, portability, cross-reference, and pricing of CD-ROM counterparts. IMHO systems like the first generation of Acer Aspire with emphasis on non-traditional designs (i.e. beige box) and user friendliness also helped.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 15:45:

Meanwhile, when I was in France in 1997, almost no one had home computers, and I'm pretty sure teachers there were expecting handwritten work to be handed in. Knowing how conservative teachers there could be, wouldn't be surprised if they'd be upset getting something typed instead. In France at least, I think mainstream home computers only became a thing in the later 1990s as they woke up and were like 'OMG the anglosaxons are way ahead of us on this Internet thing'. In two months spent there over the summer, not a single person my family visited had Internet access - my mom had one techie friend (who had in fact spent a lot of time in North America before moving back), and his hardware had gotten fried in a lightning strike the week before, and everybody else had basically never heard of the Internet. Minitel country, it still was. (And it's worth noting, Minitel was a lot cooler than anything in Canada in the early 1990s... but it caused them to be very behind on PCs, TCP/IP, the web, etc)

When I visited France in summer 2002 I had similar feelings: While I had to join a tour group unwillingly thus was unable to look into people's daily lives, their lifestyles were clearly more "analogue" than those in Taiwan or East Asia in general. OTOH I grew up within 15 minutes driving distance from TSMC foundry so my personal experience is not your average Taiwanese either. 😜

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-28, 22:53:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 15:45:

Meanwhile, when I was in France in 1997, almost no one had home computers, and I'm pretty sure teachers there were expecting handwritten work to be handed in. Knowing how conservative teachers there could be, wouldn't be surprised if they'd be upset getting something typed instead. In France at least, I think mainstream home computers only became a thing in the later 1990s as they woke up and were like 'OMG the anglosaxons are way ahead of us on this Internet thing'. In two months spent there over the summer, not a single person my family visited had Internet access - my mom had one techie friend (who had in fact spent a lot of time in North America before moving back), and his hardware had gotten fried in a lightning strike the week before, and everybody else had basically never heard of the Internet. Minitel country, it still was. (And it's worth noting, Minitel was a lot cooler than anything in Canada in the early 1990s... but it caused them to be very behind on PCs, TCP/IP, the web, etc)

When I visited France in summer 2002 I had similar feelings: While I had to join a tour group unwillingly thus was unable to look into people's daily lives, their lifestyles were clearly more "analogue" than those in Taiwan or East Asia in general. OTOH I grew up within 15 minutes driving distance from TSMC foundry so my personal experience is not your average Taiwanese either. 😜

The other thing I would note, and it occurred to me after my earlier post, is that the French have always been suspicious of all things American. And... well, the PC boom was entirely driven by American companies (and Asian components) - first IBM, Apple, then Microsoft, the big clone vendors (Compaq, Dell, etc.), Netscrape, Google, etc.

And one other thing - expensive phone calls. North America has always had unlimited local calling, which is what drove services like AOL/CompuServe, then dial-up ISPs. Assuming they had a local number in your area (and they usually did, at least for bigger areas), no phone company charges involved in calling those. No such thing in France - in fact it wouldn't surprise me if many people skipped dial-up entirely due to the cost of phone calls and went straight to DSL.

Compare that with another modern technology they adopted more enthusiastically than North Americans - cell phones - where the big players in the 1990s would have been European outfits like Nokia, Ericsson, etc and domestic carriers... and where the pricing structure for cell phone calls in North America, where i) calls were not unlimited, and ii) you were expected to pay for your inbound calls, made cell phones much less appealing. Until the smartphone boom in the 2010s, North America was way behind Europe (and elsewhere) in cell phone adoption...

Few of my observations from living in UK and Australia

In 2008 I was seeing a teacher in rural France who's only access to the internet was the schools sole Win98 PC with a modem attached in one of the schools she worked.

When I moved from Australia to the UK in 2006 I found UK companies didn't upgrade as often, Companies in Australia had mostly upgraded to XP/2003 while a lot of companies in the UK were still running windows 2000.
Still seems to be the case as when I moved back last year most UK companies were only just starting to think about Windows 11 where as the company I now work was over half way with the Win11 rollout

I finished high school in Rural Australia in 95 and we were still using 486/33's running Windows 3.11 and no internet. (apparently they upgraded and got online the following year)