[hapless]

The internet wasn't designed for high-latency, high-compression modem sessions. TCP works just fine over a 56 kbps leased line. It's terrifying on a 56k home modem, despite similar "bandwidth."

The leased line has 50 ms of very predictable latency and 56 kbps of very predictable throughput. The 56k PPP session has an unpredictable 300-500 ms of latency and a constantly varying capacity of 2.4 to 56 kbps thanks to high noise and ugly compression schemes.

Lots of things that worked perfectly well on the relatively crude internet of the 1980s were real pains in the ass on "high-tech" modems in the 1990s.

--

edit: a specific example would be X11. An emacs X11 session was totally usable on a leased line or ISDN, despite the low bandwidth, because they delivered low latency and packet loss. It was hellish on any kind of a home dial-up.

[mcguire]

Don't forget the "Eternal September" effect.

During the late '90's, I was a sysadmin for a fairly major computer science department. One of my periodic tasks, and my test of Internet health, was to download and build gcc. When I started, getting gcc took a while. By 1999 and later, when the Internet had been discovered, downloading gcc took several hours and frequently several retries.