User:2nd Ias/bbm13b

Wikipedia editing & internet speed (January 21-22, 2023) Apologies for the delay: I was just being exhausted from frequent Wikipedia editing, so this article wasn't done until this recently. Speaking of late timing, I am tempted to complain about how seemingly "slow" my internet is, but in reality, it's just normal speed. Slow speed is not an issue when it is used correctly. The high speeds we have today, even though they can be good, wouldn't be without issues. For Wikipedia, determining your editing frequency depends on your internet connection's miles per hour. We'll be going through a history from slowest to fastest and how it relates to editing stuff on this website.

Some of the earliest internet technologies like the acoustic coupler modem of 300 bits per second (bit/s and/or bps) seen in the top of the article Modem (the one with the telephone handset attached) are gonna have a long time getting to the point where the user edits an article, because those were built for audible transmission of data messages over telephone lines and leased lines, years to decades before the World Wide Web web browser was first made. The world of telephones back then was merely about talking to people, and was doing not much else. The standards for making them are far from the smartphones that would happen as early as the 1990s, and even farther from the current ones on the market, as there was no operating system (with apps, of course) in these ancient phones, a lack of services like I-mode, the absence of touchscreens, et cetera. Computers were largely not connected to them in the mid-20th century, so getting one of these things to power a PC's internet means it would take minutes, if not hours to do a big edit on an article. Please note that Wikipedia was launched in January 2001, so in that month it would be easier to access it with those slow devices as the site was relatively very lightweight, low traffic, and didn't have extremely large articles until after its big, very big popularization in the mid-2000s.

After the modems started gaining speeds of around 1,000+ bit/s (some even 10,000+), computers being connected to the internet started to happen on some scale in the 1970s. But yet the price needed to be lowered, for that the expensiveness of them made it difficult to get one without risking the near-emptying of your wallet. So less expensive tech was introduced to the many stores later into the decade and beyond. When routers became part of general-purpose minicomputers, microcomputers like the MITS Altair 8800 gained traction. The Altair 8800 was sold as a kit, but the subsequent Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, were sold prebuilt. It is possible easier than ever without issue to connect them to increasingly cheap internet devices. Such devices were now being used by general consumers. What does this relate to Wikipedia? If one were to access the site using internets connected to these legendary machines, then stuff must be configured so that lightweight environment makes it easier to go through this task of editing the source of the article completely. Be cautious with larger articles though, plus high-traffic ones, it's gonna be a real long time for the user to edit those pages in these particular setups, not to mention editing any article on this site with these modems and routers already requires quite a bit of patience.

In the 1980s, all net technologies like dialup modems with bitrate speeds in the thousands range (including the 1,200 baud and 2,400bps ones), a 300bps modem named the Hayes Smartmodem, Commodore's less-than-$100 VicModem for its Commodore VIC-20, got popular more than ever with a price decrease friendly to common buyers. These are getting faster at displaying things other than text, but still in old-school fashion, since it takes minutes for an average-length, average-traffic wiki page to load up. Editing from there is easier with this low-cost entry, as one would not have to hassle anymore about getting expensive equipment from previous years for this to work. The famed classic IBM PC, Commodore 64, Amiga (especially the Amiga 500), Macintosh 128k desktop computers (plus some laptop ones) got introduced to the public, and plenty of people bought 'em and continued to purchase 'em when it became commonplace for locations like universities to experience Usenet and/or CompuServe. Eventually 4,800, 7,200 and 9,600 bps modems were also introduced at lower prices to more success, and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) encoding increased the quickness further. S-100 bus cards for the Apple II were also in widespread use during this time, and digital fax machines were born during the increase of these higher-speed systems. It got easier to make graphics on a bulletin board system (BBS) and/or website appear on a computer speedily, which means it's less of a wait than before to get a single image to pop up in minutes, though still requiring patience. It would be advised that a text-only browser like Lynx is recommended for getting an edit done without loading everything for this long type of timeframe. Be kind and nice to your net connection.

Cue the 1990s, and the barrier of entry is lowered again with the mainstream popularization of the internet and appearance of minimum-cost tech such as modems operating over cable television lines, power lines, subcarriers, and radio technology, one of them being the SupraFAXModem 14400. It was launched by Supra, Inc. in January 1992 for $399 while offering 14.4kbit/s, making it a massive commercial success and leading to many companies dropping prices for other modems; when '92 began, 9,600bps was offered frequently at around $599, but by the year-end the $250 14.4kbps modem won many shopper's hearts. With this v.32bis modem, editing Wikipedia pages in shorter frames of time is more feasible, and uploading a file to the website is less of a struggle. AT&T, USRobotics, IBM and companies released other modems of higher speeds to varying levels of success, including 28.8kbps, 33.6kbps, 56kbps and more. Yet again the patience is needed for these kinds of lengthinesses, for that the mid-range computer (even if an IBM PC compatible) with this category of internet access is comfortable with editing lines of wiki-code ("wiki-text") when the net wire transmissions are not being clogged; a lightweight web browser like Dillo is a great choice here, due to ease of loading pages in many scenarios where the user would like to get to the "edit" page, type in stuff like formatting and references, and publish the result. Of course you can use Netscape Navigator 4.04 for it, and that's just fine and like Dillo makes sure your personal computer can handle it well. Everything is more affordable this way. Plus, softmodems, voice modems, controller-based modems, and data modems got really profitable. Early on in the mid-20th century we had modems with little bandwidth and FSK and PSK modulations, then afterward we get QPSK and DPSK, and now we're hearing of ASIC and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) trellis modems available at a lot of retailers with the ability to distribute computing components like cable modems and cellular telephone modems that connect to notebooks to people (later on they sold digital modulation modems and DSL modems, sometimes under $100). How cool is that!

As the internet reached 100 million users before the turn of the millennium, internet service providers (ISPs) like NetZero started offering "free internet" to the general public, continuing the growth of the net platform towards the 2000s when servers upgraded and traffic got huge. Around this time Wikipedia was founded, first published in a humble state with relatively minimal HTTP code compared to today with the January 2023 introduction of its new default user interface courtest of Wikimedia Foundation, a low number of short wiki web pages consisting of some paragraphs of text containing neutral information on any topic in a pretty much straight-forward-to-the-point manner, and ties with the historic 1999 Nupedia wiki/online encyclopedia and associated community that was also like Wikipedia. Nupedia went inactive in around 2003, when Wikipedia was rising as a self-proclaimed free encyclopedia. This time is the rollout of things to the normal marketplace in gigantic scale such as wifi, modems over 100kbps, and broadband internet. Computer hardware and software is of great popularity for the masses and non-masses like, so during the end of the decade the internet gained its 1 billionth user whereas Wikipedia was already well skyrocketing in terms of how many visited the site. Heavyweight software got more common after the release of Windows XP, so people either had to go with that (which may or may not go well with editing a Wikipedia article), stick with a lightweight Linux operating system with lightweight free and open source software (which does the same task faster and easier), or take a third option (any other one). They had to be be careful of their ISP limits and internet speed, as like sometimes it takes an hour for one's edit to get published. Now it's a relief that it's the norm to edit and publish a page within minutes, sometimes seconds; same applies to file uploads.

The 2010s is the decade where internet of things, smartphones, tablet computers, and the like are turned into a big part of the mainstream culture, bigger than its biggest in the 2000s. Wikipedia introduces some new features that change the user experience, one of them being a new wiki-text mode that involves the editor graphically modifying the article in contrast to the old-school interface which resembles editing HTML code. The new mode is shown to all new users upon their first edit and takes longer to load than the previous one, but there is the option to use the old wiki-text mode. (Multi-)Gigabit ethernet is on the climb to regular adoption in the beginning of the decade and years later experiences widespread commonality, with the result being that pages load near-instantly. The current decade is the 2020s, and what happened in the 2010s gets more occurrences, and very powerful computers are so much a big deal. Now the next item to exist for most people will be terabit internet speed, and this will multiply the Wikipedia experience when widely used.

So that's it! I hope you all enjoyed this multi-paragraph article. It's fun ride to make it, and I'll continue to do more when the allotted time allows it. Cheers, « 2nd |ias» 05:45, 22 January 2023 (UTC)