Technology

1999 - DSL After that, cable was pretty much everywhere I lived.

Depends on what you mean by "stop using". We never even had Internet at the house I grew up in, but for at least one job around 2000, we had dial-up on standby in case the ISDN went down, and occasionally used it for side projects even when the ISDN was working. (In fact I'm not sure we ever needed to fail over in the time I was there.). One of those side projects was mine, which means that ~2000 was the first and last time I was a dial-up user.

But then there's provisioning dial-up, which is kind of using it from the other end ...iiif you squint a bit. In that case people were still occasionally signing up with another company I worked for circa 2014. I could probably have found the usage stats back then, but was never curious enough to check and never had the need to, and I've since moved on.

Best as I can tell, that company no longer offers sign-ups to old-school dial-up service. Can't say I'm surprised. I do wonder if they've any old accounts grandfathered in though. I don't remember the dial-up number to check if there's something modem-y on the other end.

As soon as I could.

I was in a really rural area for a while, so probably 2001 when I got someplace civilized?

Somewhere in the mid 1990s, my company provided ISDN so I could work from home

We switched to cable around 2008.

2008 I think.

1998 I moved to cable modem in Argentina. Around that time also moved to optical mouse Microsoft IntelliMouse and 3dfx video card. In 2008 I got my first SSD. I think those thing were one of the most shocking technologies I experienced.

When I went to university in 2003. The telephone exchange in the village my parents lived in finally got upgraded to ADSL in 2004 or 2005 I think after a grassroots ISP collected enough subscribers to pay for it (after which the national telco was happy to start offering service, screwing over the grassroots ISP)

University internet was 10 Mbps, but the year after they kicked the dorms off the school network and put us on the consumer city fiber network which was 100 Mbps. About a decade later I moved in somewhere with 1 Gbps.

And I now have 10 Gbps at home. How times have changed...

Stopped selling it in about 2001? Stopped using it in 1999. I was fortunate enough to have been part of an ISP startup when T1 was coming in, and my apartment was serviced by me.

Fun times, I ran a BBS and traveled around my town to the 3 ISPs that had started or were starting (all tiny) asking for a job. One of them was 2 guys who were setting up 300 external modems in a York Properties building basement. I got to be employee #3 on site, learned so much there since it was ground up.

2003. Went from 56K to 3Mbps cable. It was mind-blowingly fast at the time.

But then in 2004 my parents had to go back to dialup for awhile to save money, which was brutal. Especially since I would video chat with my GF often and download all sorts of stuff from KaZaA. Have you ever tried to do a video call on dialup? 0.1-0.5 FPS and compressed so badly that it's hard to make out even basic facial features. It's a miracle that it worked at all.

I'd say 1999, first DSL was only 1.1M

2001. Was 19 still living at home when my Dad switched us to something called "@home" broadband, which became Comcast a couple years later. I do remember being blown away by seeing images load almost instantly on a web page.

That was also the last year I remember using Netscape Navigator as a daily driver. It was IE for the next four years until I switched to Firefox, and have been using that ever since. Yes, IE blows, but Navigator was starting to become a bloated mess as it started to suffer from feature creep trying to win people back.

Got DSL in like 2003? I remember some friends with 128 ISDN back in like 1998, that was mind blowing to me, not having to dial in.

About 4 hours ago.

99/2000ish i suspect? It was an Optus@Home cable connection when "netstats" was still used. It was sold as an "unlimited" plan, but really it was 10x the average download of your node.

For us, it really was unlimited because we were the only people on our node for ages. As more people connected, we started hitting the limit pretty regular.

You could also spy on your net neighbours usage because the cable modem logging (available via telnet and a default username and password) showed every connection on your node. Not sure of the technical side of this - I think because cable was in a daisy chain from node to properties and back?

Because we were early adopters, sending +++ATH0 in ping packets was super effective too heh.

2000, when the dial up service I was using announced they were shutting down.

I lucky enough to get my first DSL line in 1997.

Was only paying for 128Kbps down but this was before they actually had any throttling in place, and I was close enough to the DLAM to get 1Mbit down. It was mind-blowing at a time when a 1.44Mbps T1 line was $1000+/month pipe dream!

2008. It took a while to be affordable here.

August 2001, I moved from Berks County PA, where I was a hundred feet or so too far from getting DSL, to central Maryland where there was Comcast cable already in my apartment.

I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren't even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).

Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota...

I think our household was the first in my primary school class to get broadband, which I think was the late 90s. It was still measured in kbps (like 250-500 or so?), but it didn’t cost more to be online permanently. (ADSL).

I am not 100% sure on the exact year, but some time in the mid, possibly late, 2000s is when I think my family ditched it.

All I know is I have memories of it being somewhere around 2011-12 and not wanting to have the router moved out of my grandma's room because mine was directly below hers, which narrows it down to probably before 2010. Didn't live outside society, either.

Once my mam got sick of missing phonecalls in the evening. Early noughties I think.