[mschuster91]

> Wikipedia, forums like this one, instant messengers, etc all worked fine

The problem is, websites got wasteful. You're not going to get any modern website - including Wikipedia - to load in anything close to usable waiting times over a modem speed constraints. HN and maybe Old Reddit are an exception but HN is a niche forum and Old Reddit is probably going to get dumped once Reddit manages to port over all features that were only exclusive to Old Reddit for like six years or so. IRC is all but gone, in no small part "thanks" to Freenode going down the drain and Slack/Discord/Teams eating its lunch.

[icedchai]

Also, keep in mind that APRS is generally 1200 baud (though I did see some mention of 9600 now.) This is way worse than anything most people experienced during the dialup Internet days.

[mschuster91]

I was talking about AX.25, that allows for higher bandwidth than its subset APRS or POCSAG. But yeah, not that much, 9.600 baud is all you're gonna get on UHF/VHF, if you stick with HF it's 300 baud...

[icedchai]

Heh. My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, way back in 1987.