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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

#101

Post by Villodre »

batch12 wrote: post #28

> "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…

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.

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

#102

Post by Aloha »

Nextgrid wrote: post #22
Aloha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#103

Post by climb_stealth »

thejosh wrote: post #44
DanAtC wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here in Australia we have been pretty blessed with pretty good ISPs. In the earlier days we had Internode (locally here in Perth it was iiNet for me for a while :)), which had a Usenet mirror (!) and were the first ISP I believe to offer ADSL2 in AU. Unfortunately in 2011 they were bought out by a major competitor and it went downhill. Nowdays we have Aussie Broadband, which has an active tech community on Whirlpool…

I haven't heard about Aussie Broadband before. I take it you would recommend them then?

I hadn't known about Internode going downhill either. I'm still using them as their support is great. Price-wise looks like they both charge the same. Unfortunately no great connection here, so it ends at $100AUD for 100Mbps on a good day.

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

#104

Post by Alupis »

pengaru wrote: post #67
pixl97 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capa…

> 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.

Not everything you disagree with is greed or unethical.

The parent clearly explained physical constraints of small dial-up ISP's and their Telco providers.

The early internet and it's ISP's were vastly different than today. It wasn't uncommon for your local city to have several, or dozens of small startup ISP's available. Few, if any, were big enough to just let anyone do whatever they wanted - these were tying up phone lines, a more-or-less physical resource at the time.

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

#105

Post by pcdoodle »

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.

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

#106

Post by toast0 »

alexose wrote: post #43
INTPenis wrote: post #35

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…

Same here! I didn't learn my lesson, of course. The moment we upgraded to a DSL line, I port scanned even more machines, way faster, which led to Qwest shutting down our account, which was only re-enabled after several days worth of apologetic phone calls from my mom. Love ya, mom. Sorry I was an idiot.

I managed to get in enough trouble with dial-up accounts (sorry, Undernet admins), that I knew not to mess around when I got cable internet. And then when I went away to college, I swore off IRC to stay out of trouble.

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

#107

Post by toast0 »

pluijzer wrote: post #92
mjfisher wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You could be discharged from a job which is formalism for being fired, so I can see how a literal translation could lead you there.

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

#108

Post by roygbiv2 »

bityard wrote: post #84
INTPenis wrote: post #35

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…

Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out, but but when I was young and stupid, I "hacked" a local telephone box in the area to route a payphone line to my house. I grew up in a supremely rural area. We were not at all wealthy but still one of the few households that could even afford a computer. The computer came with a modem and I wanted to use it to connect to the world. The problem was that every phone cal…

>calling virtually anywhere cost a certain fixed rate per minute.

This is how it worked in the UK. Calling anywhere cost per min and I racked up HUGE phone bills in the early days.

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

#109

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

dylan604 wrote: post #79
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #77

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 roommat…

what geographic region are you (or "your friend") located with dial-up access?

https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php

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

#110

Post by artofcode »

roygbiv2 wrote: post #108
bityard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out, but but when I was young and stupid, I "hacked" a local telephone box in the area to route a payphone line to my house. I grew up in a supremely rural area. We were not at all wealthy but still one of the few households that could even afford a computer. The computer came with a modem and I wanted to use it to connect to the world. The problem was that every phone cal…

>calling virtually anywhere cost a certain fixed rate per minute. This is how it worked in the UK. Calling anywhere cost per min and I racked up HUGE phone bills in the early days.

I can still remember my dad's reaction when the first proper high phone bill came in... Oh boy...
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