I remember days and night just sitting there staring at an old 13″ black and white television. It was tuned to channel 3.

With a little box in the back of the TV that once connected my ColecoVision I now had something that offered me real power. It was a wire that was connected on the other side to my Commodore 64.

To this day I remember tirelessly sitting there, staring and watching the counts roll while people uploaded and download files from my BBS, then known as Sesame Street. I was the Cookie Monster and I ran the West Coast HQ for RAD – aka Rowdy American Distributors. By that time I was running at 1200 and 2400 baud – a screaming fast connection literally 4 to 8 times faster than my original 300 baud modem.

And today – I got to thinking – what would the internet be like at 300 baud? What would it be like to surf the web at those speeds?

Well, I can remember the web at 9,600, 19,200, 38.4 and 57.6 – the days of dial-up. I can even remember the day I had my @Home broadband connection turned on. HOLY S)(*#)!!!! (That’s Smokes for the easily offended!)

But how old and gray would we be if things didn’t speed up to where they have today – for us lucky enough to have broadband at home and work.

So I sat down today, built a trusty little spreadsheet and figured it out… Just for FUN! Let’s look and see what it’d take to load today’s Top 10 websites….

#1 – Google – 13,029 bytes
300 Baud: 42 seconds (even with it’s sparse home page content)
DSL/Cable/T1: 0.1 seconds

#2 – Facebook – 139,408 bytes
300 Baud: 7 minutes, 33 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1: 8 seconds

#3 – YouTube – 133,593 bytes (not including video pre-load content)
300 Baud: 7 minutes, 16 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1:

#4 – Yahoo! – 164,850 bytes
300 Baud: 8.9 minutes
DSL/Cable/T1: 12 seconds

#5 Live.com – 4,930 bytes
300 Baud: 16 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1: 0.00551 seconds

#6 – Baidu.com – 2,289 bytes (the smallest home page we could find)
300 Baud: 13 seconds – BLAZING FAST!
DSL/Cable/T1: 0.00151 seconds

#7 – Wikipedia.org – 96,783 bytes
300 Baud: 5 minutes, 15 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1: 5 seconds

#8 – Blogger.com – 75,688 bytes
300 Baud: 4 minutes, 6 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1 Baud: 3 seconds

#9 – MSN – 242,614 bytes
300 Baud: 13 minutes, 12 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1: 6.2 seconds

#10 – Twitter – 314,403 bytes
300 Baud: 17 minutes, 3 seconds
DSL/Cable/T1: 11 seconds

This Page – 819,794 bytes
300 Baud: FORGET IT!
DSL/Cable/T1: 21 seconds

I guess it’s time for me to optimize some things…

But really… What’s the moral of this story?

Quit complaining when you think the internet is running slow. Think about how it could be… Appreciate that you aren’t turning old and gray waiting a half an hour for CNN’s home page to load. And video? Forget about it!