Internet in the 1980's

[Kim]

On a related note: Barakta and I actually know an AOL user (quite possibly *the* AOL user).

My grate frends Mr Woolrich and Mr Green both still have AOL babbage-post addreses.

It's worse than that; this is ADSL, too.  IIRC it's actually provided by TalkTalk or Tiscali or some other shit ISP with a name beginning with 'T' these days.

[barakta]

I'm too young for the 1980s Internet access stuff...

First access was via a Pipex trial disk in ~1994 obtained by my dad. We only kept it for the month as Dad had work funky dialback service so they paid the phone fees. We had a "don't answer the phone on the first ring" rule which sister and mum routinely forgot much to Dad's annoyance. There was huge notes on the wall reminding them and everything - stupid gits!

First consistent access would have been around Feb 1996 as for my 16th birthday my dad's present to me was a year's Compuserv subscription at approx £6 a month + phonecalls and per minute charges. I rapidly got myself as a sysop on an LGBT forum and didn't pay per minute charges while in that place except once during a cockup at their end so I had to explain "the money will be refunded" without revealing exactly WHERE I was a sysop of cos I wasn't out to the parents then.  First modem was 14.4, upgraded to 36.6 and then 56.6 but I did have to revert to using a backup 14.4 modem which needed regular WHACKING to keep it connected for 2 weeks ... I was very good at 38 minute calls so the total amount didn't get itemised on the BT phonebill I installed the Compuserv software on my system 7 era mac and preferred the system 7 version to the post system 7.5 version which was bloated, buggy and annoying even if it did support webbrowsing of sorts. Parents were never quite sure if I was online or not as one of the good things was the ability to dial in, grab stuff, go offline, reply to stuff to an outbox then dial back out to send
 
I can remember my compuserv numeric ID and password to this day!

Stepdad uses an AOL address, he still thinks he's speaking to AOL when he phones for support - he thinks they're MARVELLOUS (the connection is a pile of poo). But then this is the man who has a wireless keyboard which drops characters if you type too fast aka faster than a slow 2 finger typist! I know I type fast by muggle speeds but for a geek I really don't type fast at all!

[barakta]

... an AOL user (quite possibly *the* AOL user).

I never actually discovered a way to cancel my account.  I did stop paying them though.  This was only achievable by trashing a credit card account.  Even after written acknowledgement from the bank that the CC account was no more, the DD demands kept on coming.
I live in constant fear that one day I'll answer the door and there'll be Men In Black carrying a bill for 20 years' back-payments plus interest ...

AOL failed to cancel one of our test uses of their free month in the 1990s and took money from my dad's credit card for a few months. He got it all refunded by being Extremely Persistently Polite At Them Down The Phone and pointing out we hadn't dialed into it at all so it was clearly not being used or wanted to be used kthxetc... It seems my Dad's beardy intimidating politeness skill works even when they can't see he's 6'2" and big built... The "assume you will get your own way and you will a lot of the time" rule holds!

[drossall]

I had a conversation with EldestCub about those.  He's reasonably geeky for a teenager, so has an understanding of dial-up even if he's never had to suffer it.  He was sceptical that AOL CDs were quite as prolific as they were, and didn't quite believe that some people managed to collect enough of them to make furniture out of.

They're good for Scouts and Guides too. I believe some people managed to bend them into plant pots/whatever. Or hang them in trees and use them as things to hunt for in the dark in games (they reflect torchlight, obviously). Or put them on the ground and use them as markers for a compass course (with anything but very short grass, you won't see them from far away).

No, please don't send me any more

[Feanor]

In the actual 80s, I was using dial-up access from an Apple ][ into Edinburgh Uni, for text-only sessions with their ICL mainframes ( they were on a private network called EMAS, the Edinburgh Multi Access System ).   This was a proprietary network of ICL 2900 series mainframes and departmental Vaxen, accessed from anywhere on campus via PDP-11 based serial concentrators from VT-100 terminals. These PDP-11 serial concentrators were called Front-End Processors, or FEPs.  They crashed. All the time.

I was Just A Number with CompuServe for a few years.
Back then, the tech talk was all about how to access the wider Internet via a CompuServe connection, without using their 'walled garden' software, and just use standard OS network stacks to access the wider Internet.
Trumpet Winsock was sometimes involved, and so was Nutscrape.

Then I migrated to Freeserve.co.uk for a few years, before ADSL came around.

[drossall]

I've still got my Freeserve address too

Oh, the joys of Trumpet Winsock. And 110-baud modems. And Mosaic, never mind Netscape Navigator.

[Greenbank]

The lowest I had were 300/300 modems or, for download intensive stuff, you could use an asynchronous 1200/75.

The only problem with the latter is being able to type faster than 75 baud.

[Kim]

We just got rid of most of our 300bps modems, as they became obsolete back in 2014.

[Jaded]

I used to play Shades on 1200/75

[barakta]

My dad is collecting CDs which are to "be binned" by the charity shop he volunteers at because his local church uses them in art and crafts and can use as many as he can find... I give it a week before he's persuaded all the other charity shops are giving him their binnable CDs too - he's already making friends and establishing himself as resident nerd.

[vorsprung]

First forays onto JANET and from there to the wider world in the summer of 1989. Connect via the terminal to a PAD and then via X25 to whichever of the Vaxen I was supposed to be working on. Coloured book protocols, reverse domain name lookups and bouncing through all sorts of networks. Dial up from home was via ULCC on 1200/75. ANyone remember Unaccess at ?Lancaster?

Yeah I was on Unaxcess, good times.  I was "countzer0".  Went a meetup in Bath with Middlesex John.
Got a copy of the source code and made it compile on BSDJ

[vorsprung]

The lowest I had were 300/300 modems or, for download intensive stuff, you could use an asynchronous 1200/75.

The only problem with the latter is being able to type faster than 75 baud.

At school the teletypewriter connected to the mainframe in Bedford via an acoustic coupler which had a top speed of 75 baud

Tho of course that wasn't the Internet

I think my first Internet modem was a then state of the art 14.4k

[vorsprung]

In the actual 80s, I was using dial-up access from an Apple ][ into Edinburgh Uni...

Tardis?

[Feanor]

In the actual 80s, I was using dial-up access from an Apple ][ into Edinburgh Uni...

Tardis?

Don't think I had to use my Tardis.

I was at Edin Uni from 82 to 86, I think.
I got the Apple in my 2nd year, so about 83.
They had been around since about 77.

[drossall]

At school the teletypewriter connected to the mainframe in Bedford via an acoustic coupler which had a top speed of 75 baud

At school in the late 70s, we'd done exams, so the maths master brought in a terminal and an acoustic coupler to connect up to Manchester University, as a demonstration.

It didn't connect to anything

[mattc]

We experimented with Webcasting meetings in the 1990s,

... and in 2017, people are still being irritated by the upstart term  "webinar".

[David Martin]

First forays onto JANET and from there to the wider world in the summer of 1989. Connect via the terminal to a PAD and then via X25 to whichever of the Vaxen I was supposed to be working on. Coloured book protocols, reverse domain name lookups and bouncing through all sorts of networks. Dial up from home was via ULCC on 1200/75. ANyone remember Unaccess at ?Lancaster?

Yeah I was on Unaxcess, good times.  I was "countzer0".  Went a meetup in Bath with Middlesex John.
Got a copy of the source code and made it compile on BSDJ

I met my housemates for my industrial year on unaccess. Nigel the fascist, John, and someone else. Oh the fun of connecting to ULCC via 1200/75 to check email on a Z88.

[Mr Larrington]

We experimented with Webcasting meetings in the 1990s,

... and in 2017, people are still being irritated by the upstart term  "webinar".

And rightly so!

[citoyen]

Quite.

[Jaded]

Indeed. It's so poor Trump could have tweeted it.

[Kim]

Haven't ACME come up with an innovative alternative to webinars?

[psyclist]

Haven't ACME come up with an innovative alternative to webinars?

Is it the pubinar to which you refer?

[Kim]

Haven't ACME come up with an innovative alternative to webinars?

Is it the pubinar to which you refer?

The very same.

[Phil W]

Haven't ACME come up with an innovative alternative to webinars?

Is it the pubinar to which you refer?

The pubinars being divided into pint sized sessions.

[DaveReading]

Nobody has confessed to using Compuserve (yet).

OK, it's a fair cop.  Did anyone else use TAPCIS ?

Later this year will be the 50th anniversary of the first time I went online (and the first bit of code I ever wrote).