What was using Dial Up internet like?

It sucked it wasn't anywhere near as easy as it is today

Worse than nowadays.

It honestly wasn't all that horrible. You'd fire up AOL or whatever your ISP's app was, click the connect button, and then your computer's modem would make noises like a robot being tortured. A few seconds later, you'd be on the internet.

Yes, it was slow, but web pages were optimized for that. Pictures were lower resolution, so they didn't take forever to load. Video was another story. You'd click to load a video the size of a postage stamp, go make a sandwich, and then come back and watch 2-3 minutes of grainy footage before the buffer ran empty and you had to pause and wait another few minutes.

I will say that the user content back then was amazing. Before the days of social media, everybody had their own web page--and often, their own website. You'd scour weird algorithm-based search engines like Alta Vista for content, and you'd be taken to the web journal of some weird accountant from Vermont, who wrote about what was on sale at his local grocery store, shared a recipe, and talked about his wife leaving him. It was super raw and super personal stuff, not just a bunch of recycled "shared" content.

I miss chat rooms a lot. You'd search a chat room out according to your interests, and end up in a 20-way conversation with a bunch of strangers. You'd make friends, meet new people, and generally have a good time. Instant messages were like texting back then, and you'd come back to your computer and have a bunch of messages from friends.

Everyone thought they were a hacker, which was lame, but kind of fun. You'd be in a chat room or having an IM conversation, and somebody would send a "nuke," which usually was a message with a bunch of special formatting in it that took the program a long time to process. They were designed to make the program crash, but that was pretty rare, and AOL or whatever would patch within a week to prevent the exploit from working.

Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa were amazing. They were all file sharing programs, and you could get all kinds of music and software from them. There were a bunch of viruses out there too (from all the "hackers"), but they were pretty easy to spot and avoid. A lot of the programs were just for pirating music and getting "cracks" to let you run software without paying for it, but a lot of it was legit user content, too. You'd queue up a couple of dozen downloads, walk away from your computer, and you'd have a bunch of new stuff when you got back.

Bulletin board systems--BBSs--were a different animal altogether. These were nerdy things that stuck out even among the already nerdy practice of using the internet at the time. Basically, a BBS was a text-based server that a person ran, usually on their home computer. Unlike AOL, you didn't need an ISP to access these--just a phone number. You'd type a weird command into a terminal emulator like HyperTerminal, and your modem would connect directly to that other computer. Some BBSs were hosted by a school or business, and had a "modem pool" so more than one computer could connect at a time and people could chat. But most of them had just a single modem, and if somebody else was on it, you'd get a busy signal and have to wait. BBSs usually had message boards, text based RPG games, chat bots (which were crude AI that would have a sort-of realistic conversation with you), and a place for file downloads and uploads--usually journals that the admins or other users wrote. It was a very personal way to interact with the admin or other users, and each BBS was like it's own little micro-internet.

It was a totally different time. Stuff wasn't just served up like it is now. You'd search something out, discover an obscure page or server somebody made, and then find other people that were looking at the same thing, and they'd lead you to other cool stuff that you'd never have found otherwise. Depending on what you did and who you talked to, you'd find an entirely different collection of content. It was almost like the internet was a completely different thing for each person.

It took about an eon to get anything done. God help you if the dial-up number was long distance. 😱

S .... L .... O .... W

like you wouldn't believe

It was too slow and you couldn't use the phone while someone was using the internet, you would hear this weird noise if you picked up the phone. My mom would kick me off the computer every time she needed to use the phone.

it seemed pretty great at the time.

It sucked. What else is there

In the late 90s I had a computer with a 33 kb/s modem which is about 1% of the speed of moderate broadband today.  It worked well because all the websites were geared to that speed.  You could receive good pictures but reasonable quality videos were still in the future.  If someone was on the internet it would tie up the phone line which led to a cartoon showing a man collapsing with a heart attack and his son is saying "but Dad if I call 911 I'll lose my aol conection."

(sound of touch tone phone dialing)

(sound of phone ringing)

(click, pause)

(Loud screeching sound, like a fax machine)

(silence)

(wait while the graphics slowly load, line by line, across your screen)

(Mom picks up the phone to make a phone call)

(Your connection just dropped)

It was dreadfully slow, but it worked.

I ran a small dial-up service out of my house, once upon a time. My service was called "Just Another BBS". i did a youtube video about it, if anyone's interested.