[ec109685]

This article makes it seems like 1996 was ancient times. There was the internet then, browsers, Mac’s had a tcp stack for a while by then, quake was an extremely advanced game.

Yeah, the dos to windows transitions was a big deal, but it was a pretty ripe time for innovation then.

[hylaride]

Yeah, but dial-up was slow, laggy, and what 95% of people used to access the internet in those days. Real-time gaming was not fun with anything that used it. I grew up in a rural area in the 1990s and was no match for people that started to get cable modems as time went on.

[bombcar]

Even when people had dial-up, a huge majority were using portal-dialers like AOL or Compuserve, and it took extra steps to use those to "get" the Internet directly as opposed to within the walled garden.

And even then they'd often just use the bundled browser.

I remember the first friend who got a cable modem, that shit was insane compared to dial-up.

[1718627440]

Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.

[giantrobot]

You're using confusing terminology so you look very wrong. What you mean to say is direct modem-to-modem connections were not laggy because there was no packet switching. This is a true statement.

What the GP comment was talking about was dial-up Internet being most people's exposure to TCP/IP gaming in the 90s. That was most assuredly laggy. Even the best dial-up Internet connections had at least 100ms of latency just from buffering in the modems.

The QuakeWorld network stack was built to handle the high latency and jitter of dial-up Internet connections. The original Quake's network was fine on a LAN or fast Internet connection (e.g. a dorm ResNet) but was sub-par on dial-up.

[kleiba]

And then there was also this: https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa...

[hylaride]

> Dial-up, has better latency, since their is no packet-switching. So it is slow, but not laggy.

It was laggy as there was buffering and some compression (at least for later revisions of dial-up) that most definitely added latency.

[ipython]

Dialup has a ton of latency (100+ms), but little jitter.

[toast0]

If you're dialed up directly, you should be able to get a little bit better latency as you won't need IP, UDP, and PPP/SLIP headers; at modem bandwidth, header bytes add meaningful latency. But data transmission is still pretty slow, even with small packets.

[pak9rabid]

Dialing-up a friend to play Quake, there essentially was no lag.

Dialing-up to the Internet to play Quake via TCP/IP...shit tons of lag (150+ ms).