Re: Best Apple Ii Web browser???

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Michael Black wrote:

>I'm surprised you find a 28.8K modem slow.  When we had a "freenet"
>here in Montreal, for all of 4 months back in 1996, I started
>off using a 2400baud modem, which I had been using to call BBS's.
>It seemed plenty fast.  Then, since I was actually using it enough,
>I decided I'd spend the hundred dollars on a 14.4K modem, to
>make downloads fast.  The next week, they announce the "Freenet"
>was closing.
>
>I used that 14.4K up until two years ago, when I moved to  an older
>Pentium that came with a 33.6K modem.
>
>For much of the five years till 2001, I was using a shell account.
>One neat thing about them is that the shell server is directly (or
>almost directly) connected to a fast internet connection, so the
>shell does not have to wait much to retrieve things.  Then, only
>what you need actually has to be transferred to your own computer.
>So if I was checking something on the web, the shell server would
>load the webpage almost instantaneously, and I could use Lynx's
>search function to find what I needed, and only the parts of
>that page that I accessed were transferred to my computer.
>
>Once you move the browser and the newsreader and the email
>reader to your own computer, things get a lot slower.  Everything
>has to be transferred, before your software can deal with it.
>
>I never found a 14.4K browser, with a shell account at my ISP,
>slow.  But doing everything on my computer, with a 33.6K modem,
>is noticeably slow.
>
>Sadly, since 56K is the end of the road for phone modems, their
>new prices have not dropped as much as previous modems when
>something faster came along, and they seem less available on
>the used market.  At least, a real hardware modem, and I won't
>use anything less.

"Fast" is whatever you have become accustomed to.

I used a 56Kb modem (rarely over 48-51Kb in the real world) for
years, and thought it was blazingly fast.

Then I got a 370Kb DSL connection, and the modem was
revealed as being s-l-o-w (particularly when I travelled, and had
to fall back to the modem).

Lately I've had a 1+ Mb cable modem, and now DSL seems slow
and the modem slows browsing to a crawl.

With a fast computer (>500MHz) the processing at the computer
end is a non-issue when browsing.  Everything depends on the
connection bandwidth and the server latency.  For any non-
congested server, web pages now "snap" onto my screen so
fast that I rarely am conscious of sequential loading.

Of course, 1Mb is still "slow" compared to _real_ networking,
where 10Mb is the floor, 100Mb is pretty good, and 1Gb is
"fast".  Streaming video is painful to watch most of the time,
not because my 1Mb connection limits it, but because the
server/internet latency frequently causes buffer underrun and
a pause for re-buffering.  We have a long way to go to make
the internet _really_ work for real-time needs, and the
bandwidth of the "last mile" is just one major part of the problem.

-michael

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