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

arstechnica.com

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

#11

Post by Simulacra »

nocoiner wrote: post #4

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 t…

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.

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

#12

Post by rus20376 »

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!

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

#13

Post by Semaphor »

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…

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

#14

Post by Aloha »

Nextgrid wrote: post #5
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #2

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.

> 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…

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.

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

#15

Post by hnbear »

neom wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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

#16

Post by halyconWays »

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.

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

#17

Post by DanAtC »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #7

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 t…

Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.

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

#18

Post by jghn »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #7

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 t…

In the late 90s I moved to an area that did not yet have broadband, so my choices were either 56k modem or pay out the nose for ISDN or similar. I got a 2nd phone line, and went the modem route but left it connected 24/7. I kept getting banned from the local ISPs for this exact reason. Luckily I moved out of the area before I ran out of ISPs available without paying long distance charges!

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

#19

Post by jghn »

OJFord wrote: post #9

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?

Some of us had our server detect when the connection was dropped for any reason and would autoconnect back in.

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

#20

Post by forgingahead »

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.

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