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.
90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
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Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel you. Already quite some years into the age of DSL I was hospitalized. I needed to stay there for a couple of weeks and had my parents bring my laptop. There was no WiFi or anything. Then I that my laptop had a dial-up socket and also say the telephone on my night table. I introduced the two and managed to get online for the rest of my stay. I used it sparsely because I knew it would cost money. When fired from…
> When fired from the hospital For anyone else that stumbled over that for a second - "fired" is of course synonymous with "discharged". English is a weird language!
I translated this literally from Dutch. I searched for it and I think it is just incorrect. Maybe English is not that weird anyway.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#93Back 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.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#94Back 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.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#95Never had this issue in the 90s in Canada... We had a phone line dedicated to internet
Never had this issue in the 90s in Texas, either. We also had a dedicated line so the Internet could always be on.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#96> "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…
I can understand that the person's time might be limited, but what an awful, brusque answer. Definitely would feel dehumanized as the recipient
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#97I 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…
I love that this comment comes from someone who portmanteaud a Meyers Briggs personality type with the word “penis”. It so perfectly matches the tone that self reflection and understanding have taken place without losing the rebellious attitude that obviously got them in trouble in the first place!
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#98Back 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…
Something similar happened with Cingular’s systems and the iPhone if I remember - the printed bill would list every kilobyte even though not charged.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#99Ha, 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…
>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_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 possib…
For sure, I definitely recall how space constrained things felt back then. Still, five megabytes of traffic per day doesn’t feel like much of an allowance, even back then. I guess it was really just intended for text-only personal pages. I wonder what kind of hardware their web server was hosted on…
I bet you’re definitely right about my ISP being on a T1. What was bandwidth on those, 1.5 Mbps? I don’t blame them for kicking me off either.
Re: 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
#100In 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.
To me internet in ~1997-8 was like a cross between a full duplex teletext crossed with multimedia and magazines.