Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 149 posts

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

#111

Post by quantumfissure »

koonsolo wrote: post #91

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.

If it was "long distance", you still had to by the minute. There were plans out there that allowed free weekends or other deals, but generally this was true nationally. If it was a local (same first 3 digit prefix of our 7 digit numbers, XXX-1234) or "1-800" call, generally it was a free. There were caveats, like in major cities, sometimes it'd be long distance to other areas, but generally "local" was the same three digit prefix as yours.

Anyone that accidentally dialed into a "long-distance" ISP or AOL number found this out the hard way.

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

#112

Post by ethbr0 »

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…

Indeed, what a dick and quintessential BOFH.

How boring do you have to be to have run an ISP, have a user contact you 25 years later, and reply with that?

And specifically, why do a job that you apparently cared about that little?

Surprised he didn't take the email as an opportunity to chastise the author about misuse of the email system for frivolous contact.

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

#113

Post by 29athrowaway »

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…

Today shodan.io does the portscanning for you.

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

#114

Post by ry4nf »

pcdoodle wrote: post #105

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 pr…

AOL had some crazy password vulnerabilities. For awhile "12345678" would validate if your password was actually 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567. So that means you could speed up your cracking by removing some of those shorter passwords from your list. Another I remember was for awhile(99-2000ish?) you could change your password and old passwords still worked. I don't know how long it took AOL to fix those but at least a few months for each one from the time I found out about them.

If you first connected to another dialup company like Earthlink you could then change AOL's connection settings to TCP/IP instead of dialup which let you go from the AOL sign-in window to completely logged in just in a few seconds. That means you could skip the entire dialup process when having to re-connect to AOL after either getting a successful crack or disconnected from the guest login screen for too many invalid guesses. Later on some guys figured out how to make "winsock crackers" that were actually really fast but would get patched when too many people started using the different methods people were finding.

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

#115

Post by jrnichols »

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…

agreed. that came across as an unnecessarily banal response from someone that is out of touch. sad to see.

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

#116

Post by jrnichols »

I remember being so excited when the 56k modems came out. My roommate and I were huge Mac evangelists back in the day (still are!) and I at the time I had a Hotline Server on my old 6100/66. I used to wake up to such loving messages as "your server sucks" and "slow piece of shit." Good times.

It remained online as long as I could thanks to a Viacom Internet Gateway, featuring Darko the Setup Wizard. We called it Drunko the wizard just for fun.

No nasty emails because I worked at the ISP. :)

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

#117

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

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…

I live in aus, we have as far as I can tell, uncapped fibre, 1000/50 is about 100usd a month give or take, anything with more upstream is extremely expensive though. The fibre infra has really come into fruition, I’m looking forward to (and expect to see) 10gbps plans at affordable rates in the next 5-10 years,

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

#118

Post by qingcharles »

artofcode wrote: post #110
roygbiv2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Yes, it was brutal in the UK in the mid-90s. That first £1000 phone bill almost had my parents divorce me.

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

#119

Post by jasonfarnon »

I don't remember issues like this in the 90s. I routinely left my 14.4k modem downloading warez overnight, and sometimes through the next day if my parents happened to go off to work in the morning without picking up the phone line. These were cheap 5/month shell accounts IIRC.

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

#120

Post by jelly »

bityard wrote: post #81
rconti wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember having to call Eskimo.com (Northwest ISP) tech support because I couldn't login to my shell account anymore. Turns out you shouldn't just copy+paste whatever you find online and shove it into your .cshrc.

I'm pretty sure I remember talking to people on IRC who used eskimo.com as their ISP. I don't know if the company is still operational, but their website sure is! https://www.eskimo.com

What a delightful website, the design is frozen in time. From the News section it appears they're still running - they posted an update on a router upgrade today https://www.eskimo.com/news/
Post reply on HN