Heh, I had a 33k6 and my buddy across (an admittedly small) town only had a 14k4. It was often faster for him to ask me to download something, and then he’d hop on his bike, ride to my place, grab the floppy, and ride home.
That, and FidoNet! Nothing like a 12-year-old arguing his clearly superior opinions on a high latency global message board!
Fond fond memories.
Edit: also got my first functional Linux distro over dialup (Slackware). Floppies were expensive too, so I somehow figured out that I could download the A packages (core system), and a small subset of the N packages (networking) to floppies, and then bootstrap my way from there. Basically just grabbed PPP, the command-line FTP client, and Lynx, did the install, and then downloaded the X11 packages and Netscape from there.
Nice. Suse Linux was my first. But that came. Couple of years later. CD-ROM was already a thing by then.
Regarding the modems. My internal PCI 36.6 modem actually got me shorter latencies than using a 50k modem over serial bus. I have no idea why. But my 50k modem was at the very last years of modems. Many where getting ISDN and cable by then.
Perhaps, like me, your serial port was driven by an older UART chip like an 8250 [0] which could be a bottleneck for modems faster than 9,600 baud.
I remember in teen years phoning the local computer shop every week asking if they had the 16550 UART [1] serial cards in stock yet to upgrade my 486DX4-100 to get full 28.8kbps from my modem. Can't remember if they ever did.
I think the 16550 was faster largely because it had a larger buffer, so it wouldn't wait or drop data as often when the CPU was slow/busy.
That, and FidoNet! Nothing like a 12-year-old arguing his clearly superior opinions on a high latency global message board!
Fond fond memories.
Edit: also got my first functional Linux distro over dialup (Slackware). Floppies were expensive too, so I somehow figured out that I could download the A packages (core system), and a small subset of the N packages (networking) to floppies, and then bootstrap my way from there. Basically just grabbed PPP, the command-line FTP client, and Lynx, did the install, and then downloaded the X11 packages and Netscape from there.