Biomedical engineer Gough Liu likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and decided he'd try to recreate what it was like to connect to the Internet via dialup back in the late 1990s.

Those of a certain age (ahem) well remember what it used to be like: even just booting up the computer required patience, particularly in the earlier part of the decade, when one could shower and make coffee in the time it took to boot up one's computer from a floppy disk.

One needed a dedicated phone line for the Internet connection, because otherwise an incoming call could disrupt the connection, forcing one to repeat the whole dialup process all over again.

The video opens by showing Liu's Techway Endeavor II computer (circa 1995) booting up, free of commentary for best dramatic effect.

Featured software includes Microsoft Windows 98 SE, Netscape Communicator 4.8, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5.

So Liu uses a miniProxy, which connects to the site in https, downloads the content, and sends it back to Liu's computer with all the links rewritten so they can go through the proxy.

"Web browsing technology has advanced quite dramatically over the years, and same with the html standards; things like CSS and certain sorts of Javascript were not around at the time that Navigator was, so the site loads up, but it looks very different from how you would experience it today in a modern browser," Liu says.

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