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It’s kind of amazing that SLiRP is still in use. Back in 1995, I was working tech support at an ISP and we used to kick people off of shell accounts all the ti

It’s kind of amazing that SLiRP is still in use. Back in 1995, I was working tech support at an ISP and we used to kick people off of shell accounts all the time for using it to get a cheaper dialup connection. It was usually the MUDers (the bottom of the barrel of internet users in ‘95).

dleslie 7y ago
We had to use SLiRP to connect to the _only_ ISP in town, back in around 93, IIRC.
myself248 7y ago
> the MUDers (the bottom of the barrel of internet users in ‘95). Oh, man. So it wasn't just my perception. An odif yltsaeb is here, walking backwards.
nixgeek 7y ago
What was wrong with MUDers? I resemble that statement, but I don't remember SLiRP. Does anyone else on HN remember Demon Internet, potentially fondly, from the 1990s and prior to the acquisition by Thus? I just noticed that brand was terminated by Vodafone in January, which is sad, they were a super clueful provider and helped out EFnet, IRCnet and QuakeNet with servers back in the day, plus were a jolly good dial-up provider for UK customers.
- unixhero 7y ago
  irc.demon.co.uk was my go-to efnet server. It was perceived as "strong" and not prone to EFNET- network splits causing you to lose control of your channels. Back in 1995-1996.
- chrissnell 7y ago
  Nothing inherently, but as ISP customers in the 1990s, they were terrible. They tended to spend extremely long periods online, which screwed up the economics of dialup hosting, which was priced for typical residential users (a couple of hours of use a day). We ended up adding ToS clauses to put a stop to them. The worst of our offenders was a couple—-a husband and a wife—-who both spent nearly all day on MUDs. One of our employees knew them and told me that they lived in a trailer in squalor. Their kid ended up getting taken away from them by Child Protective Services because of neglect. It was a really bad situation and colored my opinion of hard-core gamers.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Why was a shell account cheaper?
- babuskov 7y ago
  From the wikipedia article: > This was especially useful in the 1990s because simple shell accounts were less expensive and/or more widely available than full SLIP/PPP accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp
- zurn 7y ago
  Text-only terminal access was less fancy than real IP connectivity.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Shell accounts were cheaper to provide because people spent most of their time doing things that were purely local-- news, mail, etc-- so the bandwidth per user needed was trivial. While users using Moasic/Netscape on dialup were likely to be pegging their modem link the whole time, and almost all of those bits were bits you needed to buy from a transit provider over an expensive leased line.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    Could a user install anything on those shell accounts?
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Generally you'd have a small disk quota, and you'd get yelled at / disconnected if you used too much CPU or RAM, and you'd not be allowed to run processes while you're not dialed up. But other than that, you could compile and run stuff like slirp, sure. Then ISPs didn't like people running SLIRP, so often there were "no SLIRP" rules. :P

dleslie 7y ago

We had to use SLiRP to connect to the _only_ ISP in town, back in around 93, IIRC.

myself248 7y ago

> the MUDers (the bottom of the barrel of internet users in ‘95). Oh, man. So it wasn't just my perception. An odif yltsaeb is here, walking backwards.

nixgeek 7y ago

What was wrong with MUDers? I resemble that statement, but I don't remember SLiRP. Does anyone else on HN remember Demon Internet, potentially fondly, from the 1990s and prior to the acquisition by Thus? I just noticed that brand was terminated by Vodafone in January, which is sad, they were a super clueful provider and helped out EFnet, IRCnet and QuakeNet with servers back in the day, plus were a jolly good dial-up provider for UK customers.

unixhero 7y ago
irc.demon.co.uk was my go-to efnet server. It was perceived as "strong" and not prone to EFNET- network splits causing you to lose control of your channels. Back in 1995-1996.
chrissnell 7y ago
Nothing inherently, but as ISP customers in the 1990s, they were terrible. They tended to spend extremely long periods online, which screwed up the economics of dialup hosting, which was priced for typical residential users (a couple of hours of use a day). We ended up adding ToS clauses to put a stop to them. The worst of our offenders was a couple—-a husband and a wife—-who both spent nearly all day on MUDs. One of our employees knew them and told me that they lived in a trailer in squalor. Their kid ended up getting taken away from them by Child Protective Services because of neglect. It was a really bad situation and colored my opinion of hard-core gamers.

quickthrower2 7y ago

Why was a shell account cheaper?

babuskov 7y ago
From the wikipedia article: > This was especially useful in the 1990s because simple shell accounts were less expensive and/or more widely available than full SLIP/PPP accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp
zurn 7y ago
Text-only terminal access was less fancy than real IP connectivity.
mlyle 7y ago
Shell accounts were cheaper to provide because people spent most of their time doing things that were purely local-- news, mail, etc-- so the bandwidth per user needed was trivial. While users using Moasic/Netscape on dialup were likely to be pegging their modem link the whole time, and almost all of those bits were bits you needed to buy from a transit provider over an expensive leased line.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Could a user install anything on those shell accounts?
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Generally you'd have a small disk quota, and you'd get yelled at / disconnected if you used too much CPU or RAM, and you'd not be allowed to run processes while you're not dialed up. But other than that, you could compile and run stuff like slirp, sure. Then ISPs didn't like people running SLIRP, so often there were "no SLIRP" rules. :P