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Some context. The WELL was founded in 1985 (and is still active). Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. For thre

Some context. The WELL was founded in 1985 (and is still active). Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. For threaded public discussions (forums), Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections. Other people connected to bulletin board services (BBSs) with modems. America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and CompuServe were big commercial services; FidoNet was a noncommercial federation of BBSs; and the WELL was a BBS that was mostly known to digerati and deadheads in the SF Bay Area. Apologies to those who know the history (comments? corrections?).

Taniwha 5y ago
Usenet was more widely available than that, lots of small tech companies and individuals were connected, you didn't need an internet connection, anyone who could swing UUCP (ie a unix box and a modem) could join - the whole continent of Australia joined by air-mailing magtapes (ping times were low)
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  You didn't even really need a Unix box. There were implementations of Usenet (and the underlying UUCP transport protocol) for other operating systems, for example the Waffle BBS for MS-DOS. Ah, the joys of getting a $500 long distance phone bill.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    I got Usenet via UUCP on my Amiga exchanged with a BBS that in turn exchanged with their upstream over dialup as well, about 4 times a day. My first "web" access was via CERN's e-mail to www gateway. If I timed it right, and CERNs e-mail gateway was fast enough, I could request a URL, exchange with my upstream, have them send the e-mail to their upstream and download the result in one exchange, and then I'd dial back in 15-20 minutes later and get the page. If I was unlucky I had to wait for the next exchange 6 hours later. It's my "and we walked uphill both ways, in the snow" story.
  - TomMasz 5y ago
    I ran UUCP on a Mac Plus, of all things. But it was a local call for me.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    I’m still surprise my parents didn’t kill me from long distance bills in high school. I had a BBS that exchanged mail with Fido and Usenet with UUCP. Sadly, the nearest nodes were outside the local calling area. When a new ISP started up in the next town over, I was so excited to finally have a local number to call.
DrScump 5y ago
Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections. Usenet could be used in batch mode over dialup (periodically dial in to a friendly 24x7 server, upload postings, download articles). I participated on various newsgroups this way clear back to 1986.
brk 5y ago
I remember running a FIDOnet node for a while in the late 80's/early 90's timeframe. Figuring out long distance vs. local prefixes and next-hop's was half of the fun of it. Routing data long distances while evading long-distance phone charges felt rewarding in a way.
twoodfin 5y ago
“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on Windows 3.1 before Windows 95 built one in.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  Aaaaah, Trumpet!
  - ncphil 5y ago
    NetManage! Or WFW 3.1 and win32 extensions to run NCSA Mosaic. Good times.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Trumpet, possibly one of the most commercially pirated pieces of software in the US. Casual piracy was definitely a thing, but many ISPs sent out Trumpet Winsock to their customers without paying a dime.
- drone 5y ago
  You bring back memories for me - I worked for one of the first rural ISPs in Indiana in '95. Having to debug people's Winsock setups over the phone still makes me shudder a bit. Not to mention the Apple customers, where I didn't even have a Mac available to me and I learned by trial and error - pretending like there were dynamic outcomes for every customer "Yes, now read off for me what that screen says." The fun one was introducing people to basic concepts, like "Ok, that thing is your mouse, see the two buttons? Let me explain how you're going to use them on this call.
mattl 5y ago
> Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. Late 80s, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_provider) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_pr...
not2b 5y ago
Usenet was distributed via dialup modems via UUCP ("Unix to Unix copy"); Internet transport via the NNTP protocol was added later. Most Usenet sites were not on the Internet. This was the 80s, the era of crazy expensive long distance phone calls. At that time, commercial use of the Internet was illegal. Usenet was also in effect a federation of BBSs. Small sites would find a neighbor, hopefully a local phone call away, willing to exchange data; you'd set up a cron job to make calls at specific times and new data would be exchanged in both directions. In the early days, to send mail you had to know a route: send this message to machine A via UUCP mail, then ask A to send it to B via UUCP mail, then B will send it to ucbvax at Berkeley, which is on the Arpanet (the core of what would become the Internet) and have it send to Janus, on Berkeley's separate Bitnet network: all four hosts would be in the address.

Taniwha 5y ago

Usenet was more widely available than that, lots of small tech companies and individuals were connected, you didn't need an internet connection, anyone who could swing UUCP (ie a unix box and a modem) could join - the whole continent of Australia joined by air-mailing magtapes (ping times were low)

Turing_Machine 5y ago
You didn't even really need a Unix box. There were implementations of Usenet (and the underlying UUCP transport protocol) for other operating systems, for example the Waffle BBS for MS-DOS. Ah, the joys of getting a $500 long distance phone bill.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I got Usenet via UUCP on my Amiga exchanged with a BBS that in turn exchanged with their upstream over dialup as well, about 4 times a day. My first "web" access was via CERN's e-mail to www gateway. If I timed it right, and CERNs e-mail gateway was fast enough, I could request a URL, exchange with my upstream, have them send the e-mail to their upstream and download the result in one exchange, and then I'd dial back in 15-20 minutes later and get the page. If I was unlucky I had to wait for the next exchange 6 hours later. It's my "and we walked uphill both ways, in the snow" story.
- TomMasz 5y ago
  I ran UUCP on a Mac Plus, of all things. But it was a local call for me.
- mbreese 5y ago
  I’m still surprise my parents didn’t kill me from long distance bills in high school. I had a BBS that exchanged mail with Fido and Usenet with UUCP. Sadly, the nearest nodes were outside the local calling area. When a new ISP started up in the next town over, I was so excited to finally have a local number to call.

DrScump 5y ago

Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections. Usenet could be used in batch mode over dialup (periodically dial in to a friendly 24x7 server, upload postings, download articles). I participated on various newsgroups this way clear back to 1986.

brk 5y ago

I remember running a FIDOnet node for a while in the late 80's/early 90's timeframe. Figuring out long distance vs. local prefixes and next-hop's was half of the fun of it. Routing data long distances while evading long-distance phone charges felt rewarding in a way.

twoodfin 5y ago

“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on Windows 3.1 before Windows 95 built one in.

ubermonkey 5y ago
Aaaaah, Trumpet!
- ncphil 5y ago
  NetManage! Or WFW 3.1 and win32 extensions to run NCSA Mosaic. Good times.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Trumpet, possibly one of the most commercially pirated pieces of software in the US. Casual piracy was definitely a thing, but many ISPs sent out Trumpet Winsock to their customers without paying a dime.
drone 5y ago
You bring back memories for me - I worked for one of the first rural ISPs in Indiana in '95. Having to debug people's Winsock setups over the phone still makes me shudder a bit. Not to mention the Apple customers, where I didn't even have a Mac available to me and I learned by trial and error - pretending like there were dynamic outcomes for every customer "Yes, now read off for me what that screen says." The fun one was introducing people to basic concepts, like "Ok, that thing is your mouse, see the two buttons? Let me explain how you're going to use them on this call.

mattl 5y ago

> Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. Late 80s, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_provider) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_pr...

not2b 5y ago

Usenet was distributed via dialup modems via UUCP ("Unix to Unix copy"); Internet transport via the NNTP protocol was added later. Most Usenet sites were not on the Internet. This was the 80s, the era of crazy expensive long distance phone calls. At that time, commercial use of the Internet was illegal. Usenet was also in effect a federation of BBSs. Small sites would find a neighbor, hopefully a local phone call away, willing to exchange data; you'd set up a cron job to make calls at specific times and new data would be exchanged in both directions. In the early days, to send mail you had to know a route: send this message to machine A via UUCP mail, then ask A to send it to B via UUCP mail, then B will send it to ucbvax at Berkeley, which is on the Arpanet (the core of what would become the Internet) and have it send to Janus, on Berkeley's separate Bitnet network: all four hosts would be in the address.