54 ms·

90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

252 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
I remember getting hit with a ‘reasonable use policy’ on 256kbps where despite having an unlimited plan, they appeared to kneecap the heaviest users. I think the usage ended up being (iirc) 200gb over a month. These days I can do terabytes in an afternoon on research and nobody bats an eye. But the excitement back then was way more than what I feel today, what a crazy period.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > These days I can do terabytes in an afternoon on research and nobody bats an eye. Except Comcast and the other shitty ISPs (including mobile carriers) which implement data caps, despite there being no technical reason for it*. At least back in the day there was an actual limit to the number of active simultaneous connections an ISP can handle. * even for mobile, data caps don't make much sense, as they are monthly and per-user while network congestion is temporary and local. Better sell unlimited data plans with different speeds (priced accordingly), and only apply those speed limits if the local cell becomes congested.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    There are some good reasons for data caps on mobile carriers. The last mile is a shared access medium, and the carriers only have so much spectrum licensed to them. All mobile carriers are offering plans with soft caps, meaning you may be derated to a lower speed after a known amount of data and (usually) there are bandwidth limitations in your area.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      I disagree. The last mile is very local, limited to a single cell, whose size depends on the planned capacity (cells are smaller in cities). Congestion is therefore limited to specific cells. Furthermore, congestion is often very temporary, limited to peak hours or special events. A congestion event could last just minutes. A global monthly data cap doesn't actually address congestion very well. You can still have a sudden influx of users with available quota overload a cell, meaning they aren't getting the service they paid for as they are getting degraded speeds. On the other hand, someone who used up all their monthly quota is still getting no or degraded service (or is charged overage fees) despite being on a cell with lots of available capacity - in this case both energy and spectrum is wasted because there is an idle cell that's not being used to its full capacity despite there being demand for it. > soft caps Soft caps are, at least in some carriers, either non-existent (you get a hard block or are charged insane overage fees) or are throttled to near-unusable speeds. Furthermore, even if soft caps are implemented, they are still global (and reset monthly) as opposed to being limited to congested areas. The real reason for data caps isn't network congestion but to scare people into paying for more than they really need (which conveniently resets every month, so they can't accumulate their allowance either) and/or charge them huge overage fees if they dare exceed their allowance. If this was purely about congestion control and efficient spectrum usage, there are better ways such as the one I described in my original comment. Unfortunately in an oligopoly controlled by a handful of equally-mediocre players who have no incentive (nor capability - there is no engineering culture to enable innovation) to compete with each other, there is no feasible way to fix this.
      - placesalt 3y ago
        These (and the ones in the GGP post) are very good points. To play devil's advocate, - With data plans based on minimum speed, there would still be a possibility of service being degraded below the paid-for minimum speed during times of high usage at a cell site. There would have to be an asterisk in the contract to the effect that minimum speeds would only be supplied while possible. And, ideally, some regulatory oversight to ensure sufficient cell site capacity is installed based on the cumulative speed of the plans sold, if that makes sense. - I wonder, to what degree is the structure of cell phone data plans constrained by regulation and private agreements? IOW, are carriers allowed, under current regulation, to sell minimum-speed plans? How complicated and time-consuming would it be to unwind inter-carrier cell-site-sharing agreements?
      - Aloha 3y ago
        The big three carriers are offering (actually) unlimited data on their flagship plan, and unlimited data (with soft caps) on the others, I know because I checked the websites for each of them while I was making my comment.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    I live in aus, we have as far as I can tell, uncapped fibre, 1000/50 is about 100usd a month give or take, anything with more upstream is extremely expensive though. The fibre infra has really come into fruition, I’m looking forward to (and expect to see) 10gbps plans at affordable rates in the next 5-10 years,
neom 3y ago
Before freeserv existed in the UK we didn't have a flat rate and a 800 number you could call into, you dialed a local number and paid by the minute, mum limited me to 2 hours a day and the she would take the RJ9 cable to enforce it. One afternoon at lunch break at school I went down to the local elections store and used 2 days worth of lunch money to buy a secret RJ9. After mum went to bed I'd sneak out my cable and dial up, spend all night online and hide it again in the morning. Well... I ran up a 500 pound bill, I came home from school at the end of that month to a furious mum crying because we certainly couldn't afford it. Mum called BT and explain what I'd done, and that it was unauthorized use, thank god BT nulled my contraband internet usage but it was a valuable lesson in doing as your parents say. Really really really greatful freeserv popped up, although they eventually banned me for abusing "unlimited" (then I just got my uncle to create a new account for me).
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  Bt let me off a huge bill, too. Those were the days...
- hnbear 3y ago
  I did the same in the UK, same time period. Running up frequent bills and trying to carefully manage being online enough without hitting an unspoken £ spend threshold. But, lots of ISPs made it very easy to get online with accounts paid through the dial-in number, so I didn’t need parent credit cards. Could just dial in and get access. Then we got a second line as soon as ISPs offered an 0800 freephone number to call and she realized that the tenner a month for the ISP and a tenner for a second line was far cheaper and easier and she’d get internet too.
- baz00 3y ago
  Been there, done that. I was "temporarily" staying at my parents after a relationship had fallen through. £375 one month on dialup with Pipex. The insult was followed no less than 3 days later with a similarly large electricity bill for the skip dived fully stacked Sun 1000E and disk array I was running 24/7 as a workstation. Stupid machine - had to sleep with ear plugs in.
- pluijzer 3y ago
nocoiner 3y ago
Ha, this reminds me of getting my first ISP account cancelled when I exceeded their web hosting bandwidth limit. The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…), and my pages racked up something like 450 MB of transfers. The network administrator was quite displeased with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene Forney, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to reminisce about those times - even if only as a reminder of how far we’ve come since then!
- asveikau 3y ago
  > I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene Forney Yeah, we don't have a copy of the email that was sent to him but the response indicates that he mistook it for some kind of argument. Very strange.
- Simulacra 3y ago
  When I ran out of time on AOL as a kid, I just hacked someone else's account and used it, or used AOLHell to create a new account. I remember this other kids account was hacked for time, now he works for Google. Fun times.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…) 150MB in 95 was a huge amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve... In 2004, 9 years later the idea of 1GB of email was though of as insane >Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time. So yea, no surprise your host kicked you. *I realize this is space versus bandwidth, but they do correlate. Your ISP at that time may have only had T1 connectivity
  - nocoiner 3y ago
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each tried to tell us we were abusing the "unlimited" access. And then at some point, cable modems came out and the entire thing became moot.
- DanAtC 3y ago
  Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I remember my 56k modem running at less than half the advertised speed, and having to pay by the minute for the privilege, and that the phone number originally being "local rate" shifting into "lo-call rate" as actual local calls became cheaper. 2 TB would have taken me nearly 16 years, and cost as much as a house.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      Well, if you go 2 TB over, it might still cost as much as a house.
  - gs17 3y ago
    I wish, here my only option is Xfinity with 1.2 TB per month.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    Depends on your area. I'm in a suburb outside Portland, OR and have Ziply Fiber which sells me symmetrical gigabit with no data cap for like $80/month.
    - 3y ago
OJFord 3y ago
If they genuinely could tell it was not being actively used (or really, even if they wanted to limit to x hours whether used or not and that's what's going on here) why not just disconnect it, why resort to emailing the user? It sort of implies that's not possible, but really? I can't imagine how you could be doing the routing, monitoring the connection, and yet unable to terminate it?
- jghn 3y ago
  Some of us had our server detect when the connection was dropped for any reason and would autoconnect back in.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    And the ISP monitoring would be sophisticated enough to know that was what you were doing, but again, still not to disconnect you again (or not quickly enough, or something)?
Simulacra 3y ago
What a silly email from a CEO.
Semaphor 3y ago
Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up), my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta cracks and servers on the ISP webspace…
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > because my dad's son Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer to yourself.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Most likely referring to a half-brother or step-brother.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    It's referring to myself, and I know you'd never use that wording normally, I did it for comedic effect (specifically, to keep the phrasing in line with the preceding parts). But you know what they say about German humor …
rus20376 3y ago
I worked for a dial up ISP as a network engineer around the same time frame mentioned in the article. A standing instruction was to, as time allowed, manually look at usage across members and force resets on any long standing connections! Mainly this was because it was a small company and this freed up the number of possible incoming connections to avoid busy signals. I was very junior and cringe at how naively unaware I was of any ethical considerations!
- sdenton4 3y ago
  It's not necessarily unethical - it's a problem of resource allocation under constraints. You can either let the person who stays connected for weeks stick around, or free up space for less frequent users who are also paying customers.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    The overcommit ratio for its phone lines and modems is a knob the business selects, and it's directly linked to their profits. There's clearly an incentive to skimp here and resort to underhanded tactics. If you've promised unlimited use to the customer, it's definitely unethical.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Eh, many times, especially in the 95-97 era overcommit was not optional... that is the telco could not physically provide enough lines. The other issue we ran into was 'short-distance' calls over telco borders. In our case GTE didn't have enough connectivity to SWB to handle the number of long running connections our users. Customers in those cities would get a different mix of busy signals when we had available capacity. Was over a year before a new fiber project between the telcos was finished before the situation was resolved.
      - pengaru 3y ago
        > Eh, many times, especially in the 95-97 era overcommit was not optional... It's not an all-or-nothing switch. Obviously the less ethical/more greedy players overcommitted more than others.
halyconWays 3y ago
It really wasn't that unreasonable to be online for many hours of the day in 1998. I suppose it was still a burden on small ISPs, but I'd have expected a lot more eyebrow-raising in the early 90s. Early in the decade something was seriously wrong with you if you were "talking to strangers on your computer" for ANY amount of time.
forgingahead 3y ago
What a lovely written article, and a nice throwback to that time of the "earlier" internet. I also enjoyed the photo of the author in the motel hunched over his laptop; certainly rings a few bells for myself (and perhaps others here as well). I remember arguing with my family as I was trying to play Ultima Online on our 28.8k connection and someone wanted to use the phone. Salt in the wound was when the phone call wasn't urgent but rather just a normal chin-wag with a friend. Was always a thrill to discover if during that sliver of time after school and sports, and before homework and dinner, and nobody was using the phone (and I hadn't used up my current allotment of our shared home PC as well), I could log into UO Sonoma and play for a short but glorious time, and hopefully avoid getting grief-killed as well. Really fun times and good memories.
bwann 3y ago
As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have only had a couple dozen phone lines. For the very vast majority of subscriber, they'd dial up for 2-6 hours, browse the web and whatnot, and disconnect. I hated the "unlimited" thing at the time because it was so shady for reasons like this. But, if you tried to sell "X hours per month" people really didn't like knowing they were on the clock, and if you tried to market it as "unmetered" then you got nailed by people saying "well what's the difference between unmetered and unlimited??" (I tried both). In retrospect I probably should've just played along with "unlimited" and fired/ran off my customers who kept connections nailed up for 20 hours a day.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Wouldn't another solution to have been to appeal to the courts or the legislature to sanction competitors who used unfair and misleading wording in their plan terms?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Courts typically take years to process cases like this. By the time dialup peaked there were cases about this, but the eventual solution was the market moving to high speed internet.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This made me curious about setting up a landline again at my house (cause those work even in blackouts) and there are still a few options My favorite by far is basicISP: https://www.basicisp.net/About/BasicServices.aspx https://www.basicisp.net/About/BasicServices.aspx This is a time capsule of a website (and company for that matter!) that apparently is still actively maintained!
josefresco 3y ago
I almost missed my first (and most important) job offer in the summer of 2000 because I was on dial-up almost 24 hours a day and my phone was constantly busy. I applied for a new job and left my home phone number which was also my dialup line. Thankfully my new boss was able to finally get through, and my career in tech was born! And it wasn't even 56K because our phone lines were crap. I would get about 28K on a good day.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  I had to share a line with my parent's business. I bought this little box off ebay that listened for the call waiting signal and then dropped the internet to let the call through. Had to remember to disable the disable call waiting option in modem settings IIRC.
batch12 3y ago
> "I'm not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks," Fourney wrote. "Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998." Bleh, what a boring response from the CEO. It's always interesting to look back and where we were to appreciate how far we've come. Also, there's the nostalgia of 'simple times'.
- wkdneidbwf 3y ago
  yeah, really lame response.
- mplewis 3y ago
  I know! This is so sad. One would hope they'd be happy to reconnect with an old customer who still remembers them from 25 years ago.
- cobertos 3y ago
  I can understand that the person's time might be limited, but what an awful, brusque answer. Definitely would feel dehumanized as the recipient
- Villodre 3y ago
  It made me a bit sad that he bothered to answer in what came to me a little like a patronising response. Not expecting a "oh the good ole times" but perhaps a polite acknowledgment and a dismissal instead of the "Not sure why" part.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Indeed, what a dick and quintessential BOFH. How boring do you have to be to have run an ISP, have a user contact you 25 years later, and reply with that? And specifically, why do a job that you apparently cared about that little? Surprised he didn't take the email as an opportunity to chastise the author about misuse of the email system for frivolous contact.
- jrnichols 3y ago
  agreed. that came across as an unnecessarily banal response from someone that is out of touch. sad to see.
zooFox 3y ago
Back in the day (early 2000s), my classmate had a plan that had a limited bandwidth. That also meant there was a dashboard that you could use to monitor the usage. My classmate clearly didn't like it, because his parents could see when he was playing RuneScape. I had unlimited plan and had no monitoring in place. So I suggested him he could exceed the limit through downloading some [i]stuff[/i]. Knowing him, he went overboard and racked up a good bill. Think of someone's earnings of working for half a year, full time, at the minimal wage at the time. ISP didn't budge but they eventually found a way to upgrade to an unlimited plan and drop the bill for going over. Two happy kids...
ceautery 3y ago
This is the first time I've seen a WorldsAway reference outside of my friend group of former CompuServe employees. I remember during that time first switching over to cable internet, and how my provider was adamant that you not run a web server, and their tech support would drop you like a hot potato if you mentioned that you used a router. Such a different world. That was a fun article, thanks for posting!
bdcravens 3y ago
I did dial-up ISP support in the late 1990s. We did regularly end connections for those who were on long hours, but didn't stop them from reconnecting.
INTPenis 3y ago
I was a little bastard in the late 90s, a script kiddie who executed anything I could find. Ran very obnoxious port scans against everything online. Eventually I got a letter from my ISP and it was a thick binder with "netiquette". How to behave online. And a letter saying basically "we see everything you're doing, cut it out". They probably had complaints on the abuse address of my home IP, since I was a total moron.
- locusofself 3y ago
  I was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed everything. Went to defcon when I was 16. I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on. As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving graces in terms of employability, because I failed out of highschool and never went to college. I work at a FAANG, miraculously.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Same, had to repeat 10th grade, dropped out of 11th to get a job in IT and I've been living it up ever since. Not with any FAANG but then again I'm in Europe so we don't have such giants here. I work for the largest telco, partly government owned. (same ISP that sent me that letter;)
  - sen 3y ago
    Same here. I was a relentless script kiddy who flunked out of grade 10 because of undiagnosed ASD, but having “tech skills” in the early 90s meant I had no problem finding random IT jobs and working up to a career in Gov IT. I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught. Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”
brycewray 3y ago
Another saver of long-ago emails here, going back to my initial Internet use in December, 1995, with what then was gte.net. My first modem achieved 14.4Kbps at best, but only if it wasn't raining; for some reason, speeds dropped dramatically when the outside phone lines got wet. Thought I was in tall cotton when I got a 33.6Kbps modem. Even then, it still took over two hours to download each new version of whichever browser I was using at the time, and I’d have to wait until fairly late on Sunday night so neither wife nor daughter would need to use the phone.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  > … speeds dropped dramatically when the outside phone lines got wet. It’s not uncommon (even today) for insulation to fail somewhere on the line, which allows for water intrusion and transient shorts.
bitwize 3y ago
My wife was once on irc for so long her ISP contacted her and asked if she was trying to run a server. Worked out well in the end I guess, I met her on irc 25 years ago. As for me, well, when I was on dialup I had a brutally effective means to keep connection times short: an irate dad yelling "Get off the damn line! I need to use the phone!"
angarg12 3y ago
In the 90s I had internet at home at a time when almost all of my friends (school children) didn't even have a computer. Trying to explain the internet to someone who doesn't have a computer is still one of the most alien experiences of my life.
- anthk 3y ago
  To me internet in ~1997-8 was like a cross between a full duplex teletext crossed with multimedia and magazines.
grrdotcloud 3y ago
The ISP president called me at home when it was a teen to tell me "don't do that[0] again". I looked him up recently. He's a big player in SV now. [0] little demonstration that their Windows domain shouldn't be on the same subnet as their users.
- oxygen_crisis 3y ago
  I got a call from my mom and pop dial-up ISP in 1999 when I hit one of their BO2k honeypots. Back Orifice 2000 was a widespread script kiddie Trojan that gave clients a menu of mischievous features like changing people's desktop wallpaper or ejecting their CD tray, and malevolent ones like deleting files or dumping their stored passwords. I thought I was invincible because I got away with wardialing all through the 90's and tried to keep my hat grey by not pulling any of the malevolent tricks, but boy did I ever hit that "eject CD tray" button every single time I found a BO2k server. Fortunately for me I answered the phone when they called instead of my parents, and they were content with reminding me it was a TOS violation and letting me off with a warning. In hindsight it was probably unusually civic-minded of them to run a honeypot and use it to catch kids and just tell them to knock it off if they wanted to keep their dial-up access.
rconti 3y ago
I worked for an ISP in the 90s as a teenager, and was also a backup SysOp. We had high end gear- SGI servers, racks and racks of USRobotics Courier modems. "Good" ISPs had a 10:1 user:modem ratio. Crappy ISPs had a 13:1 ratio. Get much over 10:1 and you start risking busy signals. We didn't really track user sessions but we'd occasionally hop onto one of the Lucent Portmasters and if someone had an egregiously long session, you might reset their port. I was logged in all the time from my family home because we had a 2nd phone line leftover from the 1 year my dad had a home business. I ran the line down through some ductwork into my bedroom, and had switch boxes so I could switch which line went into the modem if I had to. From 1995 I had a Slackware Linux box online 24x7 and also (later, I guess) setup ipmasq and an ethernet interface so I could provide internet service to a 2nd computer we got in the late 90s (since, after all, the family computer had been co-opted by me, put in my bedroom, and Linux installed on it. It was always via modem, we could never get ISDN or DSL until much later (like 2002 later). A funny anecdote about leaving your modem online in those days. We had 2 phone lines coming into our demarc box, and the ringers of the phones had a strong current draw that required a capacitor (?) in the demarc box be topped up. We started having issues with quiet/silent phone rings on the "voice" line, and the modem dropping at the same time. Turned out having the modem on all the time didn't allow the capacitor to charge up, so when the phones in the house tried to draw a ton of current to ring the ringer bell, you'd basically get no current to anything, and the modem would fall over. Funny how primitive that sounds to describe it. Then again, the phone system wasn't exactly cutting edge in the 90s.
js2 3y ago
I could have been the person that sent that email (but I wasn't). In college getting my CS degree in the mid-90s, I had a job as the sole sysadmin at a small in-town ISP at a company that had the ISP as a side-business of its main business which was embedded systems development. The ISP consisted of two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston Portmaster, two dozen Hayes 56K modems and a single T1. I would have been the person reviewing access logs each morning and would have noticed someone connected for 20 hours that hadn't been sending any traffic. Yet, I don't recall every having to send such an email. We _may_ have auto-disconnected sessions after a period of time to let other callers connect, but I don't recall.
tguvot 3y ago
Used to work in local branch of first of Israeli ISPs . Entire dial-in modem pool was in one room office on wire cart. Two dozens of US Robotics. When me or any of coworkers couldn't get a line, we used to call office and random modem will be power cycled. Don't remember if packages were unlimited or not, but phone line definitely wasn't. I still remember how my mother was unhappy with 1200NS phone bill (almost minimal salary at this time frame)
kazinator 3y ago
How about 1980s. I seem to recall that some hobbyist BBS operators operating off residential phone lines were investigated by phone companies and harassed into paying for business phone lines.
p1mrx 3y ago
As a broke high school student, I downloaded this Windows utility called JAcKED that sniffs the DUN/PPP credentials from a variety of free ISP dialers: https://www.docdroid.net/1JrYKEd/jacked-readme-2001-pdf https://www.docdroid.net/1JrYKEd/jacked-readme-2001-pdf You could install some ISP adware, dial in once, uninstall, and then stay connected 24/7 with no ads or restrictions. That worked for at least a year, until DOCSIS reached our area. 1500/128 kbps was massively better than 26/26 kbps over miles of copper. Combined with AllAdvantage and a mouse mover bot (custom VB6 named notepad.exe to evade detection), you could "earn" like $8/month via questionable ethics.
shultays 3y ago
For me even the weirder part that the CEO knows the author's email program has an interval of 10mins. This CEO checked what kind of traffic is being used. Hopefully he wasn't interested in un-encyrypted traffic data as well!
- bwann 3y ago
  Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It would be trivial to go look at mail server logs to see if X login was connecting every X minutes. Encryption was seldom used there for POP3/IMAP/SMTP because hey you're on the same ISP network and not crossing the Internet. Further it was pretty easy to hop on a terminal server like a Portmaster and do a debug/packet dump of individual dialup connections if somebody really wanted to see what somebody was doing.
  - anouar45 3y ago
    hgjhgktgkg
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
As of a few years ago, my friend's roommate was receiving nastygrams from the ISP for this same thing. My friend refuses to purchase a broadband connection for the house, because she says she believes that her roommate would violate copyright on a massive scale. She uses her iPhone for everything and has no desktop/notebook. So she keeps her roommate on a dial-up modem line. And the ISP does become upset when roommate is online for long periods of time or downloads a lot of data or something. Apparently the roommate is into RPGs and forums of whatever kind. I've encouraged her to give in and get that broadband. Her wireless voice calls are spotty and sometimes I can't understand her. But she's good with the status quo.
- dylan604 3y ago
  what geographic region are you (or "your friend") located with dial-up access?
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I feel like I've stepped back in time with conversation of dial-up and being presented that website
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      That's for an active company? In the USA? Wtf is going on in Arizona? (Or perhaps _not_ going on)
- Sakos 3y ago
  I checked the big ISP in my area and I can't even find a way to book dial-up. Is that still a thing in places? edit: Oh, apparently there's still a handful here? https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/einwahlnummern.html https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/einwahlnummern.html
rob 3y ago
I miss the 90s/2000s. Like when you could register restricted AOL/AIM names by simplying changing <input name="screen_name" value="restricted_name_here"> in the form's code before submitting.
jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
Never had this issue in the 90s in Canada... We had a phone line dedicated to internet
- Digital28 3y ago
  Never had this issue in the 90s in Texas, either. We also had a dedicated line so the Internet could always be on.
koonsolo 3y ago
The big difference between US and EU was that in EU you had to pay for the minutes on the phone. So basically you were never really free to use the internet for as long as you wanted.
- quantumfissure 3y ago
  If it was "long distance", you still had to by the minute. There were plans out there that allowed free weekends or other deals, but generally this was true nationally. If it was a local (same first 3 digit prefix of our 7 digit numbers, XXX-1234) or "1-800" call, generally it was a free. There were caveats, like in major cities, sometimes it'd be long distance to other areas, but generally "local" was the same three digit prefix as yours. Anyone that accidentally dialed into a "long-distance" ISP or AOL number found this out the hard way.
jwineinger 3y ago
Back around 2000-2002, I too had dial-up internet and had set up an auto-dialer to make sure the connection stayed up, as it was being shared throughout the house via ethernet and wifi. My memory is that we started getting very large bills. When we asked about them, we were told that it was because we had several concurrent connections. What was happening is that my script to detect the connection being down was finding that and reconnecting before their system could mark the disconnection. Then my computer would reconnect and they'd never see the original disconnection, and so they'd think we had concurrent sessions and charged us accordingly. I remember them being surprised when they figured out that bug in their stuff. I think it helped that all of the connections came from the same phone number.
tiernano 3y ago
Back in the late 90s, early 2ks, the cable isp in our area started rolling out cable internet and VoIP phones. At the time, the cable internet was more expensive than we could afford, but their digital tv service included 2 phone lines, both digital (not quite isdn, but 51kb/s was normal on them). They also had a deal where the calls to their isp was "free" but had a limit of 2 hours and it would drop. I got my hands on an old 486 pc, added a modem and a nic and set it up using a router os running off a floppy. Can't remember the name off hand now. Anyway, every time it dropped, it reconnected and I was back online. Fast forward 2 months and the first phone bill arrived. It arrived in a large a4 envelope with about 100 pages in it. I opened it and the first set of pages was the internet line. Every 2 hours a line item. During the evening I was charged 1c per min. So a shite load of times for 2.40. Then in the day it was 4c per hour. So more charges for 4.80... and it just went on from there. 90 something odd pages of this. Last line item: total nearly 5 grand! And then after it, credit for the same amount. They didn't charge for the calls. The next bill came out and they stopped itemizing the bill. Bit of a panicky moment before the credit was applied. Was on that for 3 or 4 months then moved to cable Modem. Fun times.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Something similar happened with Cingular’s systems and the iPhone if I remember - the printed bill would list every kilobyte even though not charged.
pcdoodle 3y ago
Back in the AOL days, I couldn't afford internet as a teenager. Well that problem was easily solved. There was some software that would use windows API to iterate public chat rooms listbox and collect screen names for later use. After that list was pretty full and both parents went to work, the magic happened: each dial into AOL allowed 3 attempts at login before it would hang up. Adding *67 to each AOL dial maybe prevented it from banning the incoming calls? There were no password rules back then, this software would try the letters and numbers from the screen name along with asdf, love, monkey, etc. If I got lucky, there would be a fresh account or two to use until the owner couldn't login and changed their password. This worked until I could afford my own connection. It taught me VB6 in the process. Fun times.
- ry4nf 3y ago
  AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. Another I remember was for awhile(99-2000ish?) you could change your password and old passwords still worked. I don't know how long it took AOL to fix those but at least a few months for each one from the time I found out about them. If you first connected to another dialup company like Earthlink you could then change AOL's connection settings to TCP/IP instead of dialup which let you go from the AOL sign-in window to completely logged in just in a few seconds. That means you could skip the entire dialup process when having to re-connect to AOL after either getting a successful crack or disconnected from the guest login screen for too many invalid guesses. Later on some guys figured out how to make "winsock crackers" that were actually really fast but would get patched when too many people started using the different methods people were finding.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. I wouldn't call that a vulnerability, even if lets you attack passwords 2% faster.
jrnichols 3y ago
I remember being so excited when the 56k modems came out. My roommate and I were huge Mac evangelists back in the day (still are!) and I at the time I had a Hotline Server on my old 6100/66. I used to wake up to such loving messages as "your server sucks" and "slow piece of shit." Good times. It remained online as long as I could thanks to a Viacom Internet Gateway, featuring Darko the Setup Wizard. We called it Drunko the wizard just for fun. No nasty emails because I worked at the ISP. :)
- Lammy 3y ago
  I was stuck with a hand-me-down Global Village TelePort Platinum (22.8k) in the late '90s on my 7100/66 and remember being overjoyed to discover the V.34+ firmware update for it that enabled 33.6k
jasonfarnon 3y ago
I don't remember issues like this in the 90s. I routinely left my 14.4k modem downloading warez overnight, and sometimes through the next day if my parents happened to go off to work in the morning without picking up the phone line. These were cheap 5/month shell accounts IIRC.
bm0 3y ago
I convinced my parents to get a second line and let me run Ethernet around the house. Installed m0n0wall on an old PC and set it to auto-dial as needed. Ended up surprisingly reliable.

252 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

I remember getting hit with a ‘reasonable use policy’ on 256kbps where despite having an unlimited plan, they appeared to kneecap the heaviest users. I think the usage ended up being (iirc) 200gb over a month. These days I can do terabytes in an afternoon on research and nobody bats an eye. But the excitement back then was way more than what I feel today, what a crazy period.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> These days I can do terabytes in an afternoon on research and nobody bats an eye. Except Comcast and the other shitty ISPs (including mobile carriers) which implement data caps, despite there being no technical reason for it*. At least back in the day there was an actual limit to the number of active simultaneous connections an ISP can handle. * even for mobile, data caps don't make much sense, as they are monthly and per-user while network congestion is temporary and local. Better sell unlimited data plans with different speeds (priced accordingly), and only apply those speed limits if the local cell becomes congested.
- Aloha 3y ago
  There are some good reasons for data caps on mobile carriers. The last mile is a shared access medium, and the carriers only have so much spectrum licensed to them. All mobile carriers are offering plans with soft caps, meaning you may be derated to a lower speed after a known amount of data and (usually) there are bandwidth limitations in your area.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    I disagree. The last mile is very local, limited to a single cell, whose size depends on the planned capacity (cells are smaller in cities). Congestion is therefore limited to specific cells. Furthermore, congestion is often very temporary, limited to peak hours or special events. A congestion event could last just minutes. A global monthly data cap doesn't actually address congestion very well. You can still have a sudden influx of users with available quota overload a cell, meaning they aren't getting the service they paid for as they are getting degraded speeds. On the other hand, someone who used up all their monthly quota is still getting no or degraded service (or is charged overage fees) despite being on a cell with lots of available capacity - in this case both energy and spectrum is wasted because there is an idle cell that's not being used to its full capacity despite there being demand for it. > soft caps Soft caps are, at least in some carriers, either non-existent (you get a hard block or are charged insane overage fees) or are throttled to near-unusable speeds. Furthermore, even if soft caps are implemented, they are still global (and reset monthly) as opposed to being limited to congested areas. The real reason for data caps isn't network congestion but to scare people into paying for more than they really need (which conveniently resets every month, so they can't accumulate their allowance either) and/or charge them huge overage fees if they dare exceed their allowance. If this was purely about congestion control and efficient spectrum usage, there are better ways such as the one I described in my original comment. Unfortunately in an oligopoly controlled by a handful of equally-mediocre players who have no incentive (nor capability - there is no engineering culture to enable innovation) to compete with each other, there is no feasible way to fix this.
    - placesalt 3y ago
      These (and the ones in the GGP post) are very good points. To play devil's advocate, - With data plans based on minimum speed, there would still be a possibility of service being degraded below the paid-for minimum speed during times of high usage at a cell site. There would have to be an asterisk in the contract to the effect that minimum speeds would only be supplied while possible. And, ideally, some regulatory oversight to ensure sufficient cell site capacity is installed based on the cumulative speed of the plans sold, if that makes sense. - I wonder, to what degree is the structure of cell phone data plans constrained by regulation and private agreements? IOW, are carriers allowed, under current regulation, to sell minimum-speed plans? How complicated and time-consuming would it be to unwind inter-carrier cell-site-sharing agreements?
    - Aloha 3y ago
      The big three carriers are offering (actually) unlimited data on their flagship plan, and unlimited data (with soft caps) on the others, I know because I checked the websites for each of them while I was making my comment.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  I live in aus, we have as far as I can tell, uncapped fibre, 1000/50 is about 100usd a month give or take, anything with more upstream is extremely expensive though. The fibre infra has really come into fruition, I’m looking forward to (and expect to see) 10gbps plans at affordable rates in the next 5-10 years,

neom 3y ago

Before freeserv existed in the UK we didn't have a flat rate and a 800 number you could call into, you dialed a local number and paid by the minute, mum limited me to 2 hours a day and the she would take the RJ9 cable to enforce it. One afternoon at lunch break at school I went down to the local elections store and used 2 days worth of lunch money to buy a secret RJ9. After mum went to bed I'd sneak out my cable and dial up, spend all night online and hide it again in the morning. Well... I ran up a 500 pound bill, I came home from school at the end of that month to a furious mum crying because we certainly couldn't afford it. Mum called BT and explain what I'd done, and that it was unauthorized use, thank god BT nulled my contraband internet usage but it was a valuable lesson in doing as your parents say. Really really really greatful freeserv popped up, although they eventually banned me for abusing "unlimited" (then I just got my uncle to create a new account for me).

Ylpertnodi 3y ago
Bt let me off a huge bill, too. Those were the days...
hnbear 3y ago
I did the same in the UK, same time period. Running up frequent bills and trying to carefully manage being online enough without hitting an unspoken £ spend threshold. But, lots of ISPs made it very easy to get online with accounts paid through the dial-in number, so I didn’t need parent credit cards. Could just dial in and get access. Then we got a second line as soon as ISPs offered an 0800 freephone number to call and she realized that the tenner a month for the ISP and a tenner for a second line was far cheaper and easier and she’d get internet too.
baz00 3y ago
Been there, done that. I was "temporarily" staying at my parents after a relationship had fallen through. £375 one month on dialup with Pipex. The insult was followed no less than 3 days later with a similarly large electricity bill for the skip dived fully stacked Sun 1000E and disk array I was running 24/7 as a workstation. Stupid machine - had to sleep with ear plugs in.
pluijzer 3y ago

nocoiner 3y ago

Ha, this reminds me of getting my first ISP account cancelled when I exceeded their web hosting bandwidth limit. The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…), and my pages racked up something like 450 MB of transfers. The network administrator was quite displeased with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene Forney, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to reminisce about those times - even if only as a reminder of how far we’ve come since then!

asveikau 3y ago
> I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene Forney Yeah, we don't have a copy of the email that was sent to him but the response indicates that he mistook it for some kind of argument. Very strange.
Simulacra 3y ago
When I ran out of time on AOL as a kid, I just hacked someone else's account and used it, or used AOLHell to create a new account. I remember this other kids account was hacked for time, now he works for Google. Fun times.
pixl97 3y ago
>The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then, that seems awfully low…) 150MB in 95 was a huge amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve... In 2004, 9 years later the idea of 1GB of email was though of as insane >Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time. So yea, no surprise your host kicked you. *I realize this is space versus bandwidth, but they do correlate. Your ISP at that time may have only had T1 connectivity
- nocoiner 3y ago

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each tried to tell us we were abusing the "unlimited" access. And then at some point, cable modems came out and the entire thing became moot.

DanAtC 3y ago
Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I remember my 56k modem running at less than half the advertised speed, and having to pay by the minute for the privilege, and that the phone number originally being "local rate" shifting into "lo-call rate" as actual local calls became cheaper. 2 TB would have taken me nearly 16 years, and cost as much as a house.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Well, if you go 2 TB over, it might still cost as much as a house.
- gs17 3y ago
  I wish, here my only option is Xfinity with 1.2 TB per month.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Depends on your area. I'm in a suburb outside Portland, OR and have Ziply Fiber which sells me symmetrical gigabit with no data cap for like $80/month.
  - 3y ago

OJFord 3y ago

If they genuinely could tell it was not being actively used (or really, even if they wanted to limit to x hours whether used or not and that's what's going on here) why not just disconnect it, why resort to emailing the user? It sort of implies that's not possible, but really? I can't imagine how you could be doing the routing, monitoring the connection, and yet unable to terminate it?

jghn 3y ago
Some of us had our server detect when the connection was dropped for any reason and would autoconnect back in.
- OJFord 3y ago
  And the ISP monitoring would be sophisticated enough to know that was what you were doing, but again, still not to disconnect you again (or not quickly enough, or something)?

Simulacra 3y ago

What a silly email from a CEO.

Semaphor 3y ago

Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up), my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta cracks and servers on the ISP webspace…

Eisenstein 3y ago
> because my dad's son Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer to yourself.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Most likely referring to a half-brother or step-brother.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  It's referring to myself, and I know you'd never use that wording normally, I did it for comedic effect (specifically, to keep the phrasing in line with the preceding parts). But you know what they say about German humor …

rus20376 3y ago

I worked for a dial up ISP as a network engineer around the same time frame mentioned in the article. A standing instruction was to, as time allowed, manually look at usage across members and force resets on any long standing connections! Mainly this was because it was a small company and this freed up the number of possible incoming connections to avoid busy signals. I was very junior and cringe at how naively unaware I was of any ethical considerations!

sdenton4 3y ago
It's not necessarily unethical - it's a problem of resource allocation under constraints. You can either let the person who stays connected for weeks stick around, or free up space for less frequent users who are also paying customers.
- pengaru 3y ago
  The overcommit ratio for its phone lines and modems is a knob the business selects, and it's directly linked to their profits. There's clearly an incentive to skimp here and resort to underhanded tactics. If you've promised unlimited use to the customer, it's definitely unethical.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Eh, many times, especially in the 95-97 era overcommit was not optional... that is the telco could not physically provide enough lines. The other issue we ran into was 'short-distance' calls over telco borders. In our case GTE didn't have enough connectivity to SWB to handle the number of long running connections our users. Customers in those cities would get a different mix of busy signals when we had available capacity. Was over a year before a new fiber project between the telcos was finished before the situation was resolved.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      > Eh, many times, especially in the 95-97 era overcommit was not optional... It's not an all-or-nothing switch. Obviously the less ethical/more greedy players overcommitted more than others.

halyconWays 3y ago

It really wasn't that unreasonable to be online for many hours of the day in 1998. I suppose it was still a burden on small ISPs, but I'd have expected a lot more eyebrow-raising in the early 90s. Early in the decade something was seriously wrong with you if you were "talking to strangers on your computer" for ANY amount of time.

forgingahead 3y ago

What a lovely written article, and a nice throwback to that time of the "earlier" internet. I also enjoyed the photo of the author in the motel hunched over his laptop; certainly rings a few bells for myself (and perhaps others here as well). I remember arguing with my family as I was trying to play Ultima Online on our 28.8k connection and someone wanted to use the phone. Salt in the wound was when the phone call wasn't urgent but rather just a normal chin-wag with a friend. Was always a thrill to discover if during that sliver of time after school and sports, and before homework and dinner, and nobody was using the phone (and I hadn't used up my current allotment of our shared home PC as well), I could log into UO Sonoma and play for a short but glorious time, and hopefully avoid getting grief-killed as well. Really fun times and good memories.

bwann 3y ago

As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have only had a couple dozen phone lines. For the very vast majority of subscriber, they'd dial up for 2-6 hours, browse the web and whatnot, and disconnect. I hated the "unlimited" thing at the time because it was so shady for reasons like this. But, if you tried to sell "X hours per month" people really didn't like knowing they were on the clock, and if you tried to market it as "unmetered" then you got nailed by people saying "well what's the difference between unmetered and unlimited??" (I tried both). In retrospect I probably should've just played along with "unlimited" and fired/ran off my customers who kept connections nailed up for 20 hours a day.

Eisenstein 3y ago
Wouldn't another solution to have been to appeal to the courts or the legislature to sanction competitors who used unfair and misleading wording in their plan terms?
- pixl97 3y ago
  Courts typically take years to process cases like this. By the time dialup peaked there were cases about this, but the eventual solution was the market moving to high speed internet.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This made me curious about setting up a landline again at my house (cause those work even in blackouts) and there are still a few options My favorite by far is basicISP: https://www.basicisp.net/About/BasicServices.aspx https://www.basicisp.net/About/BasicServices.aspx This is a time capsule of a website (and company for that matter!) that apparently is still actively maintained!

josefresco 3y ago

I almost missed my first (and most important) job offer in the summer of 2000 because I was on dial-up almost 24 hours a day and my phone was constantly busy. I applied for a new job and left my home phone number which was also my dialup line. Thankfully my new boss was able to finally get through, and my career in tech was born! And it wasn't even 56K because our phone lines were crap. I would get about 28K on a good day.

yomlica8 3y ago
I had to share a line with my parent's business. I bought this little box off ebay that listened for the call waiting signal and then dropped the internet to let the call through. Had to remember to disable the disable call waiting option in modem settings IIRC.

batch12 3y ago

> "I'm not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks," Fourney wrote. "Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998." Bleh, what a boring response from the CEO. It's always interesting to look back and where we were to appreciate how far we've come. Also, there's the nostalgia of 'simple times'.

wkdneidbwf 3y ago
yeah, really lame response.
mplewis 3y ago
I know! This is so sad. One would hope they'd be happy to reconnect with an old customer who still remembers them from 25 years ago.
cobertos 3y ago
I can understand that the person's time might be limited, but what an awful, brusque answer. Definitely would feel dehumanized as the recipient
Villodre 3y ago
It made me a bit sad that he bothered to answer in what came to me a little like a patronising response. Not expecting a "oh the good ole times" but perhaps a polite acknowledgment and a dismissal instead of the "Not sure why" part.
ethbr0 3y ago
Indeed, what a dick and quintessential BOFH. How boring do you have to be to have run an ISP, have a user contact you 25 years later, and reply with that? And specifically, why do a job that you apparently cared about that little? Surprised he didn't take the email as an opportunity to chastise the author about misuse of the email system for frivolous contact.
jrnichols 3y ago
agreed. that came across as an unnecessarily banal response from someone that is out of touch. sad to see.

zooFox 3y ago

Back in the day (early 2000s), my classmate had a plan that had a limited bandwidth. That also meant there was a dashboard that you could use to monitor the usage. My classmate clearly didn't like it, because his parents could see when he was playing RuneScape. I had unlimited plan and had no monitoring in place. So I suggested him he could exceed the limit through downloading some [i]stuff[/i]. Knowing him, he went overboard and racked up a good bill. Think of someone's earnings of working for half a year, full time, at the minimal wage at the time. ISP didn't budge but they eventually found a way to upgrade to an unlimited plan and drop the bill for going over. Two happy kids...

ceautery 3y ago

This is the first time I've seen a WorldsAway reference outside of my friend group of former CompuServe employees. I remember during that time first switching over to cable internet, and how my provider was adamant that you not run a web server, and their tech support would drop you like a hot potato if you mentioned that you used a router. Such a different world. That was a fun article, thanks for posting!

bdcravens 3y ago

I did dial-up ISP support in the late 1990s. We did regularly end connections for those who were on long hours, but didn't stop them from reconnecting.

INTPenis 3y ago

I was a little bastard in the late 90s, a script kiddie who executed anything I could find. Ran very obnoxious port scans against everything online. Eventually I got a letter from my ISP and it was a thick binder with "netiquette". How to behave online. And a letter saying basically "we see everything you're doing, cut it out". They probably had complaints on the abuse address of my home IP, since I was a total moron.

locusofself 3y ago
I was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed everything. Went to defcon when I was 16. I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on. As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving graces in terms of employability, because I failed out of highschool and never went to college. I work at a FAANG, miraculously.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  Same, had to repeat 10th grade, dropped out of 11th to get a job in IT and I've been living it up ever since. Not with any FAANG but then again I'm in Europe so we don't have such giants here. I work for the largest telco, partly government owned. (same ISP that sent me that letter;)
- sen 3y ago
  Same here. I was a relentless script kiddy who flunked out of grade 10 because of undiagnosed ASD, but having “tech skills” in the early 90s meant I had no problem finding random IT jobs and working up to a career in Gov IT. I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught. Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”

brycewray 3y ago

Another saver of long-ago emails here, going back to my initial Internet use in December, 1995, with what then was gte.net. My first modem achieved 14.4Kbps at best, but only if it wasn't raining; for some reason, speeds dropped dramatically when the outside phone lines got wet. Thought I was in tall cotton when I got a 33.6Kbps modem. Even then, it still took over two hours to download each new version of whichever browser I was using at the time, and I’d have to wait until fairly late on Sunday night so neither wife nor daughter would need to use the phone.

catiopatio 3y ago
> … speeds dropped dramatically when the outside phone lines got wet. It’s not uncommon (even today) for insulation to fail somewhere on the line, which allows for water intrusion and transient shorts.

bitwize 3y ago

My wife was once on irc for so long her ISP contacted her and asked if she was trying to run a server. Worked out well in the end I guess, I met her on irc 25 years ago. As for me, well, when I was on dialup I had a brutally effective means to keep connection times short: an irate dad yelling "Get off the damn line! I need to use the phone!"

angarg12 3y ago

In the 90s I had internet at home at a time when almost all of my friends (school children) didn't even have a computer. Trying to explain the internet to someone who doesn't have a computer is still one of the most alien experiences of my life.

anthk 3y ago
To me internet in ~1997-8 was like a cross between a full duplex teletext crossed with multimedia and magazines.

grrdotcloud 3y ago

The ISP president called me at home when it was a teen to tell me "don't do that[0] again". I looked him up recently. He's a big player in SV now. [0] little demonstration that their Windows domain shouldn't be on the same subnet as their users.

oxygen_crisis 3y ago
I got a call from my mom and pop dial-up ISP in 1999 when I hit one of their BO2k honeypots. Back Orifice 2000 was a widespread script kiddie Trojan that gave clients a menu of mischievous features like changing people's desktop wallpaper or ejecting their CD tray, and malevolent ones like deleting files or dumping their stored passwords. I thought I was invincible because I got away with wardialing all through the 90's and tried to keep my hat grey by not pulling any of the malevolent tricks, but boy did I ever hit that "eject CD tray" button every single time I found a BO2k server. Fortunately for me I answered the phone when they called instead of my parents, and they were content with reminding me it was a TOS violation and letting me off with a warning. In hindsight it was probably unusually civic-minded of them to run a honeypot and use it to catch kids and just tell them to knock it off if they wanted to keep their dial-up access.

rconti 3y ago

I worked for an ISP in the 90s as a teenager, and was also a backup SysOp. We had high end gear- SGI servers, racks and racks of USRobotics Courier modems. "Good" ISPs had a 10:1 user:modem ratio. Crappy ISPs had a 13:1 ratio. Get much over 10:1 and you start risking busy signals. We didn't really track user sessions but we'd occasionally hop onto one of the Lucent Portmasters and if someone had an egregiously long session, you might reset their port. I was logged in all the time from my family home because we had a 2nd phone line leftover from the 1 year my dad had a home business. I ran the line down through some ductwork into my bedroom, and had switch boxes so I could switch which line went into the modem if I had to. From 1995 I had a Slackware Linux box online 24x7 and also (later, I guess) setup ipmasq and an ethernet interface so I could provide internet service to a 2nd computer we got in the late 90s (since, after all, the family computer had been co-opted by me, put in my bedroom, and Linux installed on it. It was always via modem, we could never get ISDN or DSL until much later (like 2002 later). A funny anecdote about leaving your modem online in those days. We had 2 phone lines coming into our demarc box, and the ringers of the phones had a strong current draw that required a capacitor (?) in the demarc box be topped up. We started having issues with quiet/silent phone rings on the "voice" line, and the modem dropping at the same time. Turned out having the modem on all the time didn't allow the capacitor to charge up, so when the phones in the house tried to draw a ton of current to ring the ringer bell, you'd basically get no current to anything, and the modem would fall over. Funny how primitive that sounds to describe it. Then again, the phone system wasn't exactly cutting edge in the 90s.

js2 3y ago

I could have been the person that sent that email (but I wasn't). In college getting my CS degree in the mid-90s, I had a job as the sole sysadmin at a small in-town ISP at a company that had the ISP as a side-business of its main business which was embedded systems development. The ISP consisted of two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston Portmaster, two dozen Hayes 56K modems and a single T1. I would have been the person reviewing access logs each morning and would have noticed someone connected for 20 hours that hadn't been sending any traffic. Yet, I don't recall every having to send such an email. We _may_ have auto-disconnected sessions after a period of time to let other callers connect, but I don't recall.

tguvot 3y ago

Used to work in local branch of first of Israeli ISPs . Entire dial-in modem pool was in one room office on wire cart. Two dozens of US Robotics. When me or any of coworkers couldn't get a line, we used to call office and random modem will be power cycled. Don't remember if packages were unlimited or not, but phone line definitely wasn't. I still remember how my mother was unhappy with 1200NS phone bill (almost minimal salary at this time frame)

kazinator 3y ago

How about 1980s. I seem to recall that some hobbyist BBS operators operating off residential phone lines were investigated by phone companies and harassed into paying for business phone lines.

p1mrx 3y ago

As a broke high school student, I downloaded this Windows utility called JAcKED that sniffs the DUN/PPP credentials from a variety of free ISP dialers: https://www.docdroid.net/1JrYKEd/jacked-readme-2001-pdf https://www.docdroid.net/1JrYKEd/jacked-readme-2001-pdf You could install some ISP adware, dial in once, uninstall, and then stay connected 24/7 with no ads or restrictions. That worked for at least a year, until DOCSIS reached our area. 1500/128 kbps was massively better than 26/26 kbps over miles of copper. Combined with AllAdvantage and a mouse mover bot (custom VB6 named notepad.exe to evade detection), you could "earn" like $8/month via questionable ethics.

shultays 3y ago

For me even the weirder part that the CEO knows the author's email program has an interval of 10mins. This CEO checked what kind of traffic is being used. Hopefully he wasn't interested in un-encyrypted traffic data as well!

bwann 3y ago
Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It would be trivial to go look at mail server logs to see if X login was connecting every X minutes. Encryption was seldom used there for POP3/IMAP/SMTP because hey you're on the same ISP network and not crossing the Internet. Further it was pretty easy to hop on a terminal server like a Portmaster and do a debug/packet dump of individual dialup connections if somebody really wanted to see what somebody was doing.
- anouar45 3y ago
  hgjhgktgkg

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

As of a few years ago, my friend's roommate was receiving nastygrams from the ISP for this same thing. My friend refuses to purchase a broadband connection for the house, because she says she believes that her roommate would violate copyright on a massive scale. She uses her iPhone for everything and has no desktop/notebook. So she keeps her roommate on a dial-up modem line. And the ISP does become upset when roommate is online for long periods of time or downloads a lot of data or something. Apparently the roommate is into RPGs and forums of whatever kind. I've encouraged her to give in and get that broadband. Her wireless voice calls are spotty and sometimes I can't understand her. But she's good with the status quo.

dylan604 3y ago
what geographic region are you (or "your friend") located with dial-up access?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I feel like I've stepped back in time with conversation of dial-up and being presented that website
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    That's for an active company? In the USA? Wtf is going on in Arizona? (Or perhaps _not_ going on)
Sakos 3y ago
I checked the big ISP in my area and I can't even find a way to book dial-up. Is that still a thing in places? edit: Oh, apparently there's still a handful here? https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/einwahlnummern.html https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/einwahlnummern.html

rob 3y ago

I miss the 90s/2000s. Like when you could register restricted AOL/AIM names by simplying changing <input name="screen_name" value="restricted_name_here"> in the form's code before submitting.

jdjdjdhhd 3y ago

Never had this issue in the 90s in Canada... We had a phone line dedicated to internet

Digital28 3y ago
Never had this issue in the 90s in Texas, either. We also had a dedicated line so the Internet could always be on.

koonsolo 3y ago

The big difference between US and EU was that in EU you had to pay for the minutes on the phone. So basically you were never really free to use the internet for as long as you wanted.

quantumfissure 3y ago
If it was "long distance", you still had to by the minute. There were plans out there that allowed free weekends or other deals, but generally this was true nationally. If it was a local (same first 3 digit prefix of our 7 digit numbers, XXX-1234) or "1-800" call, generally it was a free. There were caveats, like in major cities, sometimes it'd be long distance to other areas, but generally "local" was the same three digit prefix as yours. Anyone that accidentally dialed into a "long-distance" ISP or AOL number found this out the hard way.

jwineinger 3y ago

Back around 2000-2002, I too had dial-up internet and had set up an auto-dialer to make sure the connection stayed up, as it was being shared throughout the house via ethernet and wifi. My memory is that we started getting very large bills. When we asked about them, we were told that it was because we had several concurrent connections. What was happening is that my script to detect the connection being down was finding that and reconnecting before their system could mark the disconnection. Then my computer would reconnect and they'd never see the original disconnection, and so they'd think we had concurrent sessions and charged us accordingly. I remember them being surprised when they figured out that bug in their stuff. I think it helped that all of the connections came from the same phone number.

tiernano 3y ago

Back in the late 90s, early 2ks, the cable isp in our area started rolling out cable internet and VoIP phones. At the time, the cable internet was more expensive than we could afford, but their digital tv service included 2 phone lines, both digital (not quite isdn, but 51kb/s was normal on them). They also had a deal where the calls to their isp was "free" but had a limit of 2 hours and it would drop. I got my hands on an old 486 pc, added a modem and a nic and set it up using a router os running off a floppy. Can't remember the name off hand now. Anyway, every time it dropped, it reconnected and I was back online. Fast forward 2 months and the first phone bill arrived. It arrived in a large a4 envelope with about 100 pages in it. I opened it and the first set of pages was the internet line. Every 2 hours a line item. During the evening I was charged 1c per min. So a shite load of times for 2.40. Then in the day it was 4c per hour. So more charges for 4.80... and it just went on from there. 90 something odd pages of this. Last line item: total nearly 5 grand! And then after it, credit for the same amount. They didn't charge for the calls. The next bill came out and they stopped itemizing the bill. Bit of a panicky moment before the credit was applied. Was on that for 3 or 4 months then moved to cable Modem. Fun times.

bombcar 3y ago
Something similar happened with Cingular’s systems and the iPhone if I remember - the printed bill would list every kilobyte even though not charged.

pcdoodle 3y ago

Back in the AOL days, I couldn't afford internet as a teenager. Well that problem was easily solved. There was some software that would use windows API to iterate public chat rooms listbox and collect screen names for later use. After that list was pretty full and both parents went to work, the magic happened: each dial into AOL allowed 3 attempts at login before it would hang up. Adding *67 to each AOL dial maybe prevented it from banning the incoming calls? There were no password rules back then, this software would try the letters and numbers from the screen name along with asdf, love, monkey, etc. If I got lucky, there would be a fresh account or two to use until the owner couldn't login and changed their password. This worked until I could afford my own connection. It taught me VB6 in the process. Fun times.

ry4nf 3y ago
AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. Another I remember was for awhile(99-2000ish?) you could change your password and old passwords still worked. I don't know how long it took AOL to fix those but at least a few months for each one from the time I found out about them. If you first connected to another dialup company like Earthlink you could then change AOL's connection settings to TCP/IP instead of dialup which let you go from the AOL sign-in window to completely logged in just in a few seconds. That means you could skip the entire dialup process when having to re-connect to AOL after either getting a successful crack or disconnected from the guest login screen for too many invalid guesses. Later on some guys figured out how to make "winsock crackers" that were actually really fast but would get patched when too many people started using the different methods people were finding.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. I wouldn't call that a vulnerability, even if lets you attack passwords 2% faster.

jrnichols 3y ago

I remember being so excited when the 56k modems came out. My roommate and I were huge Mac evangelists back in the day (still are!) and I at the time I had a Hotline Server on my old 6100/66. I used to wake up to such loving messages as "your server sucks" and "slow piece of shit." Good times. It remained online as long as I could thanks to a Viacom Internet Gateway, featuring Darko the Setup Wizard. We called it Drunko the wizard just for fun. No nasty emails because I worked at the ISP. :)

Lammy 3y ago
I was stuck with a hand-me-down Global Village TelePort Platinum (22.8k) in the late '90s on my 7100/66 and remember being overjoyed to discover the V.34+ firmware update for it that enabled 33.6k

jasonfarnon 3y ago

I don't remember issues like this in the 90s. I routinely left my 14.4k modem downloading warez overnight, and sometimes through the next day if my parents happened to go off to work in the morning without picking up the phone line. These were cheap 5/month shell accounts IIRC.

bm0 3y ago

I convinced my parents to get a second line and let me run Ethernet around the house. Installed m0n0wall on an old PC and set it to auto-dial as needed. Ended up surprisingly reliable.