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Download speeds in the ’90s
Do you remember the sound of a dial-up modem? Ah, the robotic cat screeching, followed by the sound of pebbles in a blender, a high-pitched whine of a fax machine and a UFO holding a conversation. Back then, in the 1990s, how long did it take to download a four-minute song? Was it … A.) 3 minutes, B.) 17 minutes, C.) 36 minutes or D.) 74 minutes?
The answer: C.) 36 minutes. It could easily take 30 minutes to download a 4MB song. For my math nerds, a 56k dial-up modem transfers about 56 kilobytes per second (Kbps) for downloads, but that generally dropped closer to 7 Kbps after network overhead — roughly 9 to 10 minutes per megabyte. Today, it takes less than one second to download a tune.
Tags: dial-up modems, downloads, internet speeds, Music
