Oh no, I don't need to be reminded of those days. I still recall using a
300 baud modem with the Atari 800 to access bulletin boards. Then things
matured by way of TELNET and the Compaq 8086 portable. There was an aspect of
that which I would love to have: When using the PINE email reader it was
impossible to get a virus unless you stupidly clicked on a link and launched
it. That's why I have my email readers set to text only.
Yes, things have improved, but not entirely for the better. With higher
speed service and higher machine memory, the geeks writing web pages have
thrown efficiency out the window. Here in Phoenix you need to have a high
speed connection in order to access any TV news page as they all have high
resolution photos and as many as three embedded videos. Even with a 150M wifi
connection it can take minutes to view their pages. Same with national news
services such as cbsnews.com.
At the same time I can easily access bbc.com/news on 32K dialup as their
pages use low resolution thumbnails for photos and no embedded videos. When
you click on the story, then you get the higher resolution photos, and if you
want to see the video you have to click on the icon. That is a website that is
written with the intent of getting information to the end user as efficiently
as possible.
Interestingly, this morning I had a serious heart stoppage when I went to
use Paypal to pay for a couple of evilBay items. They have been making serious
radical changes to their interface, and when I tried to log in on Paypal they
did not recognise my user name or password, and that was on the coffee shop
wifi. That plus they had fallen back to their earlier login page, which
actually works better than the one they tried using with the graphics overage
that caused their server to time out with a dialup connection.
Turns out that overnight they changed that login page so that you are
routed through an Adobe Flash interface, and my Adobe Flash was in need of
updating. I over-rode the blockage, took care if the Paypal payments, then
updated Adobe Flash.
Another aspect of those changes is that the new coding has portions that
Earthlink sees as malware thumbnails, so you can no longer use it through
Earthlink dialup.
Someone needs to take the evilbay/Paypal IT department out to the woodshed.
>
>Trumpet Winsock! Yes, I remember, so you must be showing my age too, David.
>The days when Windows didn't know anything about Internet, when you had to
>look really hard to find a free web browser, when Gopher and Veronica were
>cutting-edge.
>
>Netscape or Spry, anyone?
>
>Piers
>
>if someone on the list needs a reminder of how bad these things
>were, and how far we've come since, I found a WfW3.11 VirtualBox image
>the other day (and a DOS6.22 OVA too). You'll probably need to find
>trumpet winsock or similar to get it on your TCP/IP LAN... :) (Now I'm
>showing my age :))
>
--
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