| That's what broadband was for. So you could have dramatically better speeds than the vast majority of users. That way, pages which nominally took 20 slow seconds to load
over a phone modem, would appear instantly for you if you were privileged enough to have broadband. Nowadays, "everybody" has broadband.
But instead of the rapid browsing experience which everyone was looking forward to, we now have a slower user experience
with broadband on most web sites than there was in 1996
with dial-up modems. Back in 1996, most people did not yet have 56Kbaud modems,
so the wise webmasters made sure their sites were optimized
enough for mainstream consumers having 28.8K or at most 33.6K which would guarantee outstanding performance to the widest variety of visitors.
When they were really serious about engaging users who did not have brand new computers, a site would need to perform decently at 9600 baud which was what the majority of installed modems still ran at, originally purchased for faxing. When you occasionally went went to a slow, bloated page from
a major technology company you knew right away it was
"privileged idiots" on broadband without a clue as to how
slow their "masterpiece" website behaved compared to what
was expected from modem users. Downloading files was expected to be slow, but web sites were not.
Actually lots of MP3's were downloaded over modems, that's what MP3 was developed for.
If you posted something, copyright was not a problem since you were not sharing it with the public, only those few who
were online. Almost 20years later, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now. There are probably engineers who are making sure their
sites perform at 2G speeds without sinking below 1996 performance experiences, but from what I've been reading about interviewing & hiring trends it looks like they are excluded as extreme minorities within their percentiles. Oh, well, I don't make the rules, just observing their disfunction. |