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What is so ancient only an Internet veteran can remember?

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Re: What is so ancient only an Internet veteran can remember?

#8

Stolen "PCPursuit" and Telnet accounts, so long distance bills wouldn't be so bad. When "YMODEM" was a real improvement in information technology.

Telenet. :)

For the uninitiated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

Another big one was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet

The reason some big online providers (some or all of, for example: AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy) had so many local access numbers (which was important since long-distance was so expensive) was that those numbers were actually Telenet / Tymnet, which the client used to connect to the service.

Connecting to the web via dial-up AOL looked (maybe still looks?) like:

Browser HTTP(S) (I forget this component) AOL client Modem PSTN X.25 AOL backend HTTP(S) Website

Is the part that I’m forgetting SLIP/PPP? I forget how that was implemented in Windows… Possibly both the browser and the AOL client talked to that.

(That was all after you could use AOL for TCP/IP, which wasn’t always the case.)

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