How common was this? That was precisely how I discovered porn. Found a Hustler magazine on a trail I used as a shortcut between housing developments on my paper route when I was 11. Then found a whole stash of them in another part of the woods near a tree fort I built with some friends.
this is my porn origin story, found a crusty old magazine in a sandrock lean-to that was clearly a person's hidey hole. we buried it in shame after it seared into our memories
I remember you had to pick and choose what images you wanted because of how long it took to download. Thumbnails were critical and nothing more of a cock block then the image getting corrupted part way through.
Man it was a real artifact of time that I remember some email newsletters back on AOL where the writer would get mad and kick you off the list if you didn't reply to the newsletter thanking the author.
Back in the AOL days you would hang out in the Warez chat room, and you would subscribe to download files using email as the delivery. Chat for a few minutes and then next time you log in. You've got files!
You never saw IE6 running on Win98 with a dozen toolbars installed, did you? The place was infested and you actually needed to know what you were doing.
Antivirus would be pinging constantly back in those days. I haven't had my AV detect anything since the early 2000s.
Now you have catphishing, ransomwere, lot's of different types of scammers and your credit cards can be stolen from some random e-commerce site. You also need to know what you're doing.
The ICQ, AOL and MSN chats were a big focus then. I can still hear those notifications too. It was a simpler time before psychology was brought into hijack our attention.
They have done a excellent job of that with the latest generation of the web. It's too bad we have lost much of the soul of the early web in the process...
I believe that part was doing a sound quality test to ensure the data rate could be reached. If the line quality was bad it would connect at a slower rate since it was based on frequency.
It's a specific 56K protocol. There were a few different types of 56K modems and they did the last part of the handshake differently. One did the "boing boing" and another common one had more of an ascending tone at the end of the handshake.
Imagined that cartoon progressively downloading while I sipped coffee. The image size told the browser how much space to leave for lagging graphics. Text browsers were best over dialup untill mbs speeds arrived. Cable modems eliminated the modem speaker since they were never used for human frequency range