Internet Dialup on a Slow Computer: Windows 98 Simulator

Many of us have kids who are doing school remotely at home, especially right now as schools go remote temporarily in the light of the rising Omicron variant. Some kids are sitting the full school day at the computer accessed by the internet.

But even if they’re not, our kids are fully internet literate — and have some of the most user-friendly tech on their hands. Really, they have no idea how good they have it. Long gone are the days of AOL boot-ups and massive, 30-pound computers, of blocking the phone line when you surfed the world wide wibe. These kids these days have no idea how good they have it — not only because the internet wasn’t fast – but our computers were dead slow. And now we have proof of that to show our kids.

Digg dug up a fun video that fellow parents will not only get a hit of nostalgia from when they watch but it can also show our kids just how good they have things now. Gough Lui wanted to “try and recapture the dialup experience” and using a salvaged vintage (ouch, we’re vintage now) computer he did just that.

Gough was able to get the computer to turn on and run, which is a feat all on its own. But he also took a video of the computer in real-time, and we have a 23-minute video of a really, really slow computer that was the coolest thing when we were younger. Sit your kids in front of it and make them realize just how great they have it.

“The narration on this video was unscripted, so it jumps a bit from place to place and is a bit rushed,” Gough writes in his blog post about his project, “but it was done in one take. I hope you enjoy!”

The struggle was real. And watching this video brings it all back. And the comments on the video show are collectively giggling over how slow dial-up was.

“The days of turning on your PC and walking away for 30 minutes while it does it’s thing,” one person wrote. “That hard drive ‘grinding’ sound is nostalgic,” another commented. And another comment nails it right on the head why this throwback video is so interesting for us to watch: “It used to be so exciting back then, having such a wealth of information at hand was overwhelming at times, we really take it for granted these days.”

Next time your kid complains of lag in their video game or how “slow” their laptop is, pull this video up and have a giggle.