3 ms·
Why was a shell account cheaper?
by quickthrower2 7y ago
Why was a shell account cheaper?
- babuskov 7y agoFrom 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 agoText-only terminal access was less fancy than real IP connectivity.
- mlyle 7y agoShell 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 agoCould a user install anything on those shell accounts?
- mlyle 7y agoGenerally 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