3 ms·

I find it misleading how so many of these articles talk about dial-up Internet at home, as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the Internet. For m

by retrac 2y ago

I find it misleading how so many of these articles talk about dial-up Internet at home, as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the Internet. For most people in the 90s, their first exposure to the Internet was on a public or company computer. The heat from a couple dozen CRT displays packed into a slightly too small room, was an integral part of the experience. As was "Downloading... (134 B/s)" while a couple dozen instances of Netscape all tried to cram their request packets over the 128 kbit/s ISDN line that served the whole campus.

ranger_danger 2y ago
> as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the Internet Because for many, it actually was.
- thejazzman 2y ago
  Looks like someone didn't get their free 1000 hours of AOL. Maybe that's why I got so many.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Of the hundred(?) or so AOL CDs that my parents and I got, only one came with a freephone (0800) number; the others were local-rate (0845) numbers that made it the same cost as all the other dialup ISPs.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
adamomada 2y ago
It really was though. A lot of people with computers got their first modem to dial into BBS systems or the compuserve type systems. Small ISPs got started up and you usually found out about them through BBSes as well because they didn’t really have ad budgets and it was so niche. A friend of mine and I split the cost of a 1200 baud modem for the c64 and took turns with it. This was magic back then: 80 column terminal on a c64: http://kobolt.website/infocenter/images/novaterm-top.jpg http://kobolt.website/infocenter/images/novaterm-top.jpg