Screechy Modems and 8-inch Screens

I wanted elegantly themed pages of subtle colors and artistic backgrounds and loads of images. But I accepted Webmonkey's advice and designed my Bugbones page to conform to something less than state-of-the-art technology. Users were running obsolete dinosaurs, said Webmonkey. That meant Windows95 and 8-inch monitors and 19kb dial-up modems. If broadband was around, nobody I knew had it. In fact, it was all I could do to understand the definitions of these terms when I ran into them. What's DSL? What's broadband? I tore up my keyboard up trying to get an answer to these questions. I knew what a modem was: the thing inside my PC that made a horrid screechy sound when I clicked the Internet icon. A modem sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard, and if I was lucky, I got a growl and hiss that told me the hookup was complete. It's not a friendly sounding thing. Perhaps we should have taken that growl as an omen that the Internet did not want us. But we ignored the screech and growl and waited the slow, slow wait for our browsers to load. As for my page design... I had no trouble, beyond mere thoughts of rebellion, to restricting my layout to stay within the limitations of dial-up modems and 8-inch screens. That's what I was running. It was all I knew.

The perils of Bugbones.