Chris ShireThere seems to be a lot of nostalgia around at the moment for the early internet and tech devices of the late 90s/early 2000s - I can see why, the enshitification of the web has made things pretty depressing in many ways. I saw Alex Kretzschmar’s mastodon post showing a Netgear switch old enough to drink and vote and remembered my first ever wireless router as they looked so similar.
Now look at this bad bwoy! This baby could give you all the megabytes you needed!
Now you don’t need to tell me that’s one of the nerdier and sadder sentences someone could utter…but hear me out, there’s a reason why. Back in the “old days” when broadband was just beginning wider adoption, I had only had a computer for about a year or so. It was an absolute piece of shit; second- (or possibly third-) hand parts from a school friend. I vaguely remember the specs - 233mhz CPU, 128mb sdram, 8 gig hard drive. It was shat even for 2002. However, I was absolutely obsessed. I filled the hard drive in a couple of months just ripping cd’s. I wanted a DVD drive or CD writer (can’t remember exactly which), so I ordered one online. I was too excited to have my friend come and install it so I gave it a go myself…
I learn what voltages are
It worked! Sort of. The thing is, the Power Supply unit in my PC had a switch on the back which I had spotted. One side said 240v and the other said 110v. Obviously this was to run in either North America or in the U.K.
This was not obvious to me, I had no idea because I was an idiot. Frankly a dangerous idiot because I was both confident and motivated. These traits are not always a good thing.
I figured I’d just switch it to 110v and my PC would now magically run on less power! My mum had been complaining about the power it was using! I flicked the switch. There was a stomach-churning chunk sound and the box was no more. I frantically called my friends who proceeded to explain that I was a fucking moron and needed to buy a new power supply, as well as to start my prayers and offerings to the Tech-Gods in the hope that nothing more serious had been damaged.
A week or so later a new PSU arrives in the mail and brings my piece of shit back to life! Lesson learned.
However, I wanted a bigger hard drive for more of the music I had been ripping (and, frankly, pirating - hello Kazaa! How many of you millennials also fucked the family PC doing this eh?).
Who remembers this little purple bastard?
Because if you do, you knew your computer was now quite a bit dirty and infected and you would need to explain to your parents (or plead complete ignorance) about all the crap you had been downloading.
I learn about n+1
I saved up and bought a 60gb Maxtor hard drive from a computer market on a Saturday morning somewhere in North London…only to realise that drives this size all used SATA interfaces…which my piece of shit PC did not have! Ahh, IDE how I do not miss thee. Master/slave jumpers anyone? Yeah, glad that’s in the past.
Anyway, my piece of shit needed to become less shitty! It was time to pull out the big guns and ask for a new motherboard & processor for my birthday. My mum was super resistant- partly because she thought that computers all break and partly that I was a bit thick and over confident in getting the new bits to work. Obviously she had plenty of evidence to support the latter.
Anyway, £150 later and I am the proud owner of a 2ghz AMD CPU (omg the speed!) and a gigabyte motherboard. I can’t remember exactly how much ram, but DDR hadn’t come out yet so it was probably slow and tiny. It didn’t matter though, my computer ROCKED. At this point it also needed an OS upgrade - bye-bye Windows 98 and Windows ME! (I was not displeased to see the back of ME, it absolutely deserved the reputation it got), hello Windows XP!
It was 2003 and I now owned an iPod 3rd generation. I had a decent PC, I had decent storage. The future was here!
But I needed more - More data! More speed! I needed…broadband…
I get a guerilla broadband line
Now I don’t know if anyone remembers this, but there was a fair amount of F.U.D around broadband in the early days. I had been told on apparently good authority that it could almost irreversibly break your regular phone line…somehow. My mum didn’t need to be told twice - anything that might cost more money and require something being fixed was definitely no bueno. However, I had friends now who had broadband in their bedrooms! I couldn’t let it go.
As it happened, my friend who built/sold me my original piece of shit PC had an 802.11b wireless card. He explained that with this new thing called WiFi, I wouldn’t have to have a phone port in my room to get online (which was fortunate because I didn’t and it was absolutely out of the question to get one). I started saving for a wireless modem router - the Netgear MR814 pictured above! However, this would have to be hidden in the kitchen where the phone port was. My mum would go mental if she found out- The only bit that was visible was the microfilter which was now casually dangling our of the phone socket.
Don’t mind me ma’am, just hanging about doing absolutely nothing suspicious!
My mum spotted the microfilter instantly, but I got away with a sigh and a very-real threat that if anything broke or she had to be pay more for anything in any way that I would be dead. She didn’t spot the router and she didn’t know that broadband and it’s speedy wonders would be coming to our house.
So, I now had a WiFi connection to my bedroom…in 2003! I think it’s hard to explain to people today how much of a new thing this was - there was no Wifi anywhere, phones did not connect to WiFi, tablets didn’t really exist and laptops had ethernet jacks to plug them into the wall socket! Even a couple of years later when I got to University, there was still no WiFi and there were ethernet jacks in the dorm rooms. This was new tech!
Anyway, I had a network, but no broadband yet. By this point I had my first job and I took a gamble on my first utility…my own broadband connection! I signed with Pipex for about £30 a month. I remember the day it was activated - it was just before 5pm on a Wednesday. I know this because I had to leave by 5:20 to not be late for a shift at my job. I was late that day. I remember getting a glass of water from the kitchen and checking my little guerilla Netgear router. The internet light had gone green! I nearly tripped over my own feet as I got to my bedroom, opened Internet Explorer and refreshed the page. The Google search page! I had internet in my room!
And that’s how it stayed until I moved out abotu 18 months later- a hidden broadband connection! I remember torrenting with a download speed of just under 60kbps and thinking that it was so fast I was now essentially one with the internet. However, hiding the router took its toll on the casing, which basically melted. It still worked until it was eventually replaced many years later!
To be honest I didn’t plan this post to be anything longer than a quick remembrance, but so many of these early experiences shaped how I interact with and consider tech today. The nostalgia is a bit much sometimes, but I think people have a point. I miss forums, even the ones that were a bit strange. The higher barriers to entry really did mean that communities were more interesting sometimes. I don’t know what point I have with this, but it’s nice to think sometimes about a period that really was genuinely exciting, fun and new with regards to tech. Or maybe it’s still fun, exciting and new and I’m just old and grumpy.