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In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email addresses were allocated, etc. Most pe

In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email addresses were allocated, etc. Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly. Every site was http by default and only switched to https when you were going to buy something. Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes). Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a lot more fun, lots to explore and find.

PaulRobinson 1y ago
I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk. The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like. I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in. When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes. We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C. Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life. We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again. Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful. I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more. It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.

PaulRobinson 1y ago

I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk. The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like. I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in. When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes. We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C. Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life. We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again. Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful. I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more. It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.