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I remember using UUCP to link the half-dozen or so nodes of our little local net back 1991 (or thereabouts). One of our members shared an excited piece of info

I remember using UUCP to link the half-dozen or so nodes of our little local net back 1991 (or thereabouts). One of our members shared an excited piece of information: "Hey, wow! I just heard there's a whole million nodes on the Net." The Net back then was Usenet, email, and (sometimes) ftp. That new-fangled WWW thing was just a strange curiosity. It would never take off anyway, how would you know what websites were around? And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.

tialaramex 6y ago
> And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive. I firmly believe Always On made more difference than the Broadband bandwidth most users got at the same time. My first student household had 24/7 Internet access at modem speeds, 56kbps (at best) shared between half a dozen people. But even though that's scarcely any bandwidth (my last student house was 2Mbps DSL shared between two people for comparison) the fact it's always there changed how we used it compared to people with conventional dial-up.
- simonblack 6y ago
  When I first got Always On, it still took me several weeks before I wasn't twitchy enough to actually leave it on. Those years of 30 hours of monthly connection quotas died hard. It was a bit of a shock to the system again, when in 2011 I spent 8 months travelling in France with 2gig/month (60mb/day) quotas again.