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This part was interesting to me: “…Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections” I suppose it used to be the college kids h

This part was interesting to me: “…Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections” I suppose it used to be the college kids had the fastest internet, in the dorms and such, and were the drivers of innovation. I graduated a state school recently and let me tell you, our dorm internet was garbage. On top of that, it was heavily policed by IT and I don’t think it’d be possible for a student to host a web server or even burn some CD’s from torrents.

smackeyacky 5y ago
From 2000: Napster was taking up a significant amount of bandwidth in colleges at the time, enough for it to be problematic: https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9fdc-19145e034d3b.html https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9f...
schnable 5y ago
Ay my school in the early 2000s, we had on-campus fiber to the desktop--we had to buy fiber PCI cards for our computers--and no security whatsoever. I don't remember how fast the connection to the outside world was (fast enough for heavy Napstering and Lime-wiring for sure), but the internal network was blazing fast, and a lot of music and movies made the rounds on SMB shares.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Early 1990s, we had two 10base-T lines to each dorm. Still most people used old school modems and didn't even know what ethernet was. I bought a load of cheap ethernet cards nearly wholesale and demo'ed-then-sold them to students for a couple of years. Didn't pay my tuition but gave me a few spending coins.
  - stephenhuey 5y ago
    in the late 90s at Rice we had a blazing fast connection and I could video chat via MS NetMeeting with friends at other universities. It seemed so magical, and now it’s a surprisingly rare occasion that I use FaceTime or any desktop video chat option.
polpo 5y ago
In 1999 I ran a mail server with qmail that handled incoming and outgoing mail for my personal domain and also a somewhat large (20GB) pirate MP3 FTP site, all from a server in the closet of my campus dorm room. The campus IT never said a word!
LukeShu 5y ago
I graduated from a state school in 2016, and in the dorms each student had their own 100Mb/s Ethernet jack, and it was actually easy to pull or push that speed over it. However, there was a limit to how much you data allowed to pull/push from the public Internet in a rolling 24 hour block.
- Lammy 5y ago
  Hence the need for a local DC++ community (well, ADC these days) so you can enjoy all of the speed with none of the data cap ;)

smackeyacky 5y ago

From 2000: Napster was taking up a significant amount of bandwidth in colleges at the time, enough for it to be problematic: https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9fdc-19145e034d3b.html https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9f...

schnable 5y ago

Ay my school in the early 2000s, we had on-campus fiber to the desktop--we had to buy fiber PCI cards for our computers--and no security whatsoever. I don't remember how fast the connection to the outside world was (fast enough for heavy Napstering and Lime-wiring for sure), but the internal network was blazing fast, and a lot of music and movies made the rounds on SMB shares.

ryandrake 5y ago
Early 1990s, we had two 10base-T lines to each dorm. Still most people used old school modems and didn't even know what ethernet was. I bought a load of cheap ethernet cards nearly wholesale and demo'ed-then-sold them to students for a couple of years. Didn't pay my tuition but gave me a few spending coins.
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  in the late 90s at Rice we had a blazing fast connection and I could video chat via MS NetMeeting with friends at other universities. It seemed so magical, and now it’s a surprisingly rare occasion that I use FaceTime or any desktop video chat option.

polpo 5y ago

In 1999 I ran a mail server with qmail that handled incoming and outgoing mail for my personal domain and also a somewhat large (20GB) pirate MP3 FTP site, all from a server in the closet of my campus dorm room. The campus IT never said a word!

LukeShu 5y ago

I graduated from a state school in 2016, and in the dorms each student had their own 100Mb/s Ethernet jack, and it was actually easy to pull or push that speed over it. However, there was a limit to how much you data allowed to pull/push from the public Internet in a rolling 24 hour block.

Lammy 5y ago
Hence the need for a local DC++ community (well, ADC these days) so you can enjoy all of the speed with none of the data cap ;)