TECH TALK Going Off the Grid
LET’S NOT MINCE WORDS: I’ve been around the block, technologically speaking. My first “real” computer was a Commodore 128 in the mid80s, and I cut my teeth on MS-DOS 2.x on an IBM PC XT compatible. Our family got a special with the C-128, where it came wi
I remember the squeal of the modem as it connected, followed by ASCII art welcome screens. One popular BBS in my youth had an ASCII art picture that was about three screens’ worth of text. Let me help our younger readers put that into context. The C-64 (because almost no software ran in the native C-128 mode) used a television for its display, running a 40x25 character text interface. 300 baud meant I could transfer a bit less than one line of text per second, so just waiting for the welcome screen could take a couple of minutes. But then, loading games off floppies—and, before that, tape drives—took several minutes as well, so we learned patience.
After a few years, we upgraded to a 9,600 baud modem. My BBS world was radically altered when I discovered welcome screens popped up in a matter of seconds! No longer did I need to think about whether it was worth the delay to go view a new screen; I could check it out, and if it didn’t catch my interest, I could exit and find something else to do. Modems picked up speed, and I eventually moved to a 28.8k and then 56k model, but somewhere along the way, the Internet happened. Even a 56k connection could feel slow when surfing the web, especially for sites that included a lot of images.
When I upgraded to broadband DSL in 1996, capable of a whopping 768kb/s, I couldn’t believe how fast everything felt. Even complex web pages opened in seconds, and “massive” 50–100MB downloads only required 10–20 minutes. (Remember, Windows 95 was only a couple hundred MB.) My patience muscles were still in great shape coming from dial-up, so I didn’t mind the wait. Twenty years later, though, I am no longer a patient man.
My home Internet connection is pretty fast, at 250Mb/s down but only 12Mb/s up, and multi-gigabyte downloads are commonplace. I have a dozen or so web pages open at once, 20 or more devices are connected to my network, and life is good. But every so often, you need to get away from it all and go on vacation. Which is where I am now.
The world has been radically altered by high-speed Internet connectivity and mobile broadband. I’m in the sticks, tethered to my smartphone, and I can pull data at about 1.5Mb/s. I’d have been more than happy with such a connection in the late 90s, but in 2017? Yuck! I’m ready to scream, waiting for just my standard web pages to refresh. Just the PCGamer.com/hardware page takes about 10 seconds to load, which isn’t too bad, but multiply that by 15, and it feels like going from an SSD back to floppy disks.
It makes me wonder: With 100Mb/s and faster Internet connections now quite common, and the bleeding edge fiber connections pulling 1–10Gb/s, in another 20 years will I find 250Mb/s unacceptably slow? Will we all have 40–80Gb/s connections, available wherever we go, streaming augmented reality to our glasses, and enabling experiences we can’t begin to imagine? I hope so! But we might run into the same limitations we’re hitting with processors, where the rate of advancement no longer comes in quantum leaps, but in incremental steps.
Whatever happens, I’ll still need to drop off the grid on occasion, and leave my cell phone in the tent. Always on, always connected? Nice in theory, but sometimes I don’t want to be found. Now, pardon me, I have some swimming to do….