After I left university, all I had was a (free) 2400bps connection to a modem bank on an X.25 PAD system, accessible to alumni - fortunately PPP existed and I c

After I left university, all I had was a (free) 2400bps connection to a modem bank on an X.25 PAD system, accessible to alumni - fortunately PPP existed and I could bring up TCP/IP over the link, at least... I actually feared this would be the only Internet access I would have from then on. Soon after that, commercial dial-up Internet access became more prevalent and I upgraded to the dizzy heights of 14k4bps and beyond! Another thing from those days that we no longer need is something called a 'midnight line' - British Telecom in the UK offered this; although I never had one I knew of people who did. It was a phone line that was unmetered from 00h00 through to 08h00 or so, which allowed BBS and Usenet users to dial up for free across the country and exchange mail and news feeds. Phone charges at that time were prohibitively expensive, especially nationally, plus local calls were not free in the UK and things like 0800 numbers for POPs were still unheard of.