Prologue – Is the cable modem ever going to get here?
I live in Madison, WI, y’know the best city in to live in as of 1998 or something. I’m 23 years old and a system administrator at a local company. Anyway, the cable modem service had been promised to this area for the last two years. Most of the speculation in that two years was that It was going to be so terrible that you were on a shared network, or that you could only upload at 28.8 etc. I’m sure everyone who got a cable modem right away had those same conversations. The beta program came to Madison sometime in May or June. It pretty much came from nowhere as it was not advertised anywhere. A friend of mind signed up for the beta right away, had it installed and basically couldn’t stop talking about how fast it was and how pages came up instantly and how his downloads hit up to 200kb per second. That was pretty much enough for me. I called Bresnan and set up an appointment to have it installed 08/02/1999, the day after I moved to a new place.