[22c]

Carmack's comments and the comments in the thread entirely surprise me.

256kbit/s was pretty much the standard ADSL speed 20 years ago. I remember thinking it was lucky some of my friends had 512kbit/s and 1500kbit/s was considered extremely fortunate.

Even still calls over Skype worked fine, you could run IRC or MSN Messenger while loading flash games or downloading MP3s. You could definitely play games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake, UT2004, etc. on a 256k ADSL line. Those plans were also about 8x the price of this plan, not even adjusting for inflation.

Not only that, those lines were typically only 64k upload speed. The usefulness of a 500kbit/s up/down line is incredibly high. I think the only reason it might seem less useful now is that web services are not typically optimised to be usable on dial-up speeds like they were 20 years ago.

With the right setup and having feeds/content download asynchronously rather than "on-demand", 500kbit/s is still plenty of internet by today's standards.

[stavros]

No need to be surprised, 512 kbps isn't enough because it would take a gif half a minute to load at those speeds. We just didn't send gifs back then.

[nly]

We totally did, and they loaded and played progressively. More like we weren't pushing 20MB of JavaScript to people browsers.

[Atheros]

The Dancing Baby gif, which was abnormally large, and went viral via email in 1996, is around 220 KB. At this speed, it would load in 3.5 seconds. And being 4 seconds long, it could stream.

[Grimblewald]

No even that was fine and common. Massive blocks of ads, analytics, etc werent the norm though and i for one miss a time we wouldnt conceive of introducing it.

[rayiner]

Browsing the internet on a 256 kbps SDSL modem in BeOS in 1998 is still the fastest web experience I’ve ever had.

[the_arun]

Unfortunately it wouldn’t work. All web applications need to redesign their apps for this speed.