Some of you will probably think your already paying a lot for your
internet. Some of you will be on the lowest package as you think
having a monthly cost for your internet over ten pounds is too much.
Let me tell you, you have it easy.

Back in the day, after modems came isdn. This technology effectively
doubled the fastest internet you could get at the time to a mind
altering speed of 64kps - bear in mind today the average broadband
connection is probably 512kps (half-a-meg) to 2048kps (two-meg) and
you can see what sort of speed and time period i'm talking about here.

I remember being 18 and having three phone lines into my house. I
never really used the third normal phone line. But i had the other
two phone lines installed so i could have the option of bonding two
64kps lines together. I was a rare breed, requiring the heady
heights of 128kps at home. I had been exposed to what i could have
access to by having a faster internet connection and going back to
33.6kps seemed like something i could not deal with.

At the time i had a stable job, and an easy job at that - i worked two
shift patterns. two till ten in the afternoons and seven till three
the next week, sometimes i got a good run at it and did more morning
sessions than the nights. i hated the night sessions. maybe i'll go
into that on my main blog here on posterous some other time.

I was a full time gamer back then. spending as much as 5-6 hours
(and more at weekends) playing quake2 mainly - away from the world, in
this digital space squeezing the most out of the digital connection.
i remember that the isdn no longer made a noise and it was quick to
connect, maybe a few seconds. It was not that much of a speed bump
really but the illusion made sense, removing the onboard speaker from
the device/card - a new world was then opened up to me regarding
latency and packet loss. fine tuning your connection to your isp, i
think i used 'enterprise' at the time. in fact i still remember our
team - called [qf] - we had a good team, we pretended to be a girls
team. it annoyed the lad teams to get spanked by girls. it was part
of the ego play of the time. i got pretty mean with that rail.

Oh, and the £800 a quarter phone bills. I nearly forgot. You see
back in the day you had to pay by the minute. 1p a minute. that soon
racked up but it was too late, i was addicted to my connection to this
alternative place. It was the earliest notion that we would not care
in the future how we got things delivered to us in digital format and
that because the transaction was transparent we would be addicted to
the consuming later on. You pay for the now, if you need it now and
you do not have to think about it and you have the linked up assets
you pay - the earliest memory that my reactions would now cost me in
this new world. in the game, and in the bank.

shoutouts to accident and jalissa. oldskool.