I remember spending 15 minutes to download a picture from Legend of Zelda that was supposed to be an example of what the upcoming Project Reality/Ultra 64 could do.
LMAO. in the uk NTL dialup would reset after 2 hours. friends set up router PCs to drop and redial automatically. I had blueyonder, with no restriction.
In fact, in Nov 2000, I accidentally left it dialed up when I went to Vegas for 2 weeks (BattleBots 2.0) and it was still connected when i got back
You see, I thought this letter was going to be your ISP worried about your health but I should have known better that it comes down to money and resources.
You weren’t connected to the Internet by default. You had to log into your internet provider and dial in using your modem (which connected via phone wires, which was the style at the time).
Electric ghosts were sacrificed with each connection, and you could hear their screams through the modem.
About 15 years ago I was on Comcast's top 20 bandwidth users list for 3 months in a row. They shut my service off and had a lawyer call me to discuss reactivation.
I didn't have an internet connection in 1998 unless I used my college ID to see if they let me use the computer lab or went to the 1 friend's place I knew who had AOL.
I did an internship with marvel comics in 97-98 and part of my duties was developing content for their AOL site. With that came an unlimited AOL developer account. The credentials were something really obvious like marvel/stanlee, and i used that account for emergency dial-up access for yeeeeeeeears
Ah, memories. At that time my ISP would disconnect me every 6hrs on the dot. I had a 486 with Linux on a floppy acting as NAT and dialer, that would beep and msg me in IRC to warn the drop was coming..
There was Usenet and other places to get MP3s in 98. We used our high school network and a zip drive to get songs. The biggest issue was file transfer speed.
Back in 98/99 we used to audit an ISP that provided dial up connections for one of the big name companies. Every dial up connection had a physical port behind it, a load of which were located at TeleHouse in Docklands, London. That building had security like something out of a Bond movie!
I worked for MSN WANOPS in the 90s (remember MSN dialup?). Two stories: first project: enforce per-user connection limits. There were ISPs reselling MSN account connections, with thousands of customers. Once we limited each account to two at once, our utilization went way down and... 1/n
our customers connected went way up! Amazing. Story two: we had a presentation from BT about a new data center for Microsoft/MSN (the one you mentioned). They went on about the ingress from each side, bollards, sally ports, and all that physical stuff. 2/n
Our GM said "that's very impressive!" The guy from BT said "The IRA will have to get it together to take you off the air." Same planet, different world. We never thought of physical security to that level in the US (this was during the troubles). Dozens more stories there; those stick with me. 3/3
I vaguely remember some sort of partial moat round some of the building and the entrance was single person full height turnstile, with two armed security guards on the inside and we don't have armed guards anywhere over here.
my first job at MSFT was as a PM for MSN dial-up, at the time our mission was to keep it alive w/tin cans & string bc AOL had beat the crap out of MSN & they weren't going to invest more money. my main project (before I moved over to windows) was trying to fix the french MSN dial-in manager
We probably passed each other in the halls of 25N or RedWest. Was Eric Engstrom over there at that point? I worked with him later, and he said the first thing he did was delete all of the outbound-capable lines. I said "we used those for QoS by calling other POPs". Apparently nobody knew that.
oh god that is a name i haven't heard in two decades. there was so much of MSN that was institutional knowledge / involved going to the data center and demanding entry
My first ISP in Seattle was called NWlink. They had some kind of mechanical failure which limited lines & while they tried to fix it, I would come home from work & before even starting dinner I would start running the dialer hoping I'd get through before I was done. The owner sent these emails
I worked for ITG and security in 93? 94? and MSN WAN OPS in 95? 96? to 98. I think Eric came in post-99. Worked on moving from XNS->TCP IP in ITG. Eric died a couple years ago. Young guy. MSN was wild!
I was at MSN beginning 98, before that did a bunch of startups that failed, interviewed at AMZ but refused to bring my transcript, talked to Starwave but didn’t want that commute, then went to MSFT & was there until 04. I moved over to Windows in 99. It’s a very tiny world!!
Hee hee, my dial-up ISP offered "24 hour dial-up" and gave us 5MB (maybe 50? not sure, it wasn't much) of free web space, so I ran a website with my modem set to auto-reconnect and all of the images up in the server.
When I was in college (this would have been 1990), I got a similar message from the school IT department as I'd been logged in for 48 hours. I explained that I had been working in a computer lab on a project that whole time, only occasionally trading off with my lab partner for nap breaks.
I’m sure my dad was with an ISP in the UK that let you have unlimited dialup for life for £50 (until they went under!) can’t remember there name though!
Around y2k I was WFH in the UK and installed a second line so I could also use the phone (essential for the job), and British Telecom just split the line so my 56k speed dropped to 28k.
I was producing celebrity internet chats for major TV networks. Still was able to do it. Sucked, though.
In 98 I used to log in after work on a Friday and log out late on Sunday evening. They had a deal that over the weekend any local rate connection was capped at 50p.
Speeds would be capped too but when the alternative was 1-5p per minute at full speed, I'll take 50p/call every single time.
Ouch, I was only a kid at the time so I wasn’t getting up to those sorts of antics, but our isp only gave us 25hours a month before they charged overage, and my parents most definitely didn’t want to pay overage 😂
Hah! I remember those warnings. My fav internet anecdote from 98 is paying 5 bucks an hour for dial up internet access at the Steaming Bean Coffee Co in Telluride Co where my mom and I lived. It was an Internet cafe and I would play that strategy game Myth online.
Did nobody call your house for a 20 hour period? I felt like our landline was always blowing up, and I had to yell at folks not to touch it yet because my legally questionable song was mid transfer and I’d lose an hour’s worth of progress if it got interrupted.
Bandwith was a bug deal back then. Remember it was by hours not data back then. The free ones were a joke because the ad banner would literally eat up half your bandwidth. Remember day I got cable internet felt like heaven.
This is why my ISP had "dedicated" plans for users who didn't expect their SLIP (later PPP) sessions to be intentionally dropped; they understood online.
Too bad they didn't understand how to survive what the net would change into; I miss them sometimes.
At this time in 1998 I was cueing up a whole night's worth of email attachment downloads sourced from AOL warez chatrooms (usually about 2 albums tops @ 128kbps). Never saw a single threat. 🤷♂️ Your ISP sucked, lol.
In the small town I grew up in (in the 90s) everyone had the same first two digits for their phone number. So sometimes people would just give you the last five
December 1997, a Canadian ISP literally yelled at my friends because the flood of .mp3 I had sending them by email for weeks in 1.44 MB slices was swamping their SMTP server... Damn kids, thinking "unlimited" means "unlimited" !
Comments
And it looked amazing.
In fact, in Nov 2000, I accidentally left it dialed up when I went to Vegas for 2 weeks (BattleBots 2.0) and it was still connected when i got back
Electric ghosts were sacrificed with each connection, and you could hear their screams through the modem.
The hit Bluesky post is now a full Ars Technica article with more details for your reading pleasure
INSERT *video clip of the dial up modem dial tone, dialing, tone, white noise/fuzz and success sounds and then busy signal*
🤣🤣🤣
But I was always online when awake at home in '98 because irc
They didn't approve of that at all.
https://technologywest.io/team/gene/
https://smuggler.xyz/global/commercials/chris-smith/esurance-hank/
I was producing celebrity internet chats for major TV networks. Still was able to do it. Sucked, though.
Speeds would be capped too but when the alternative was 1-5p per minute at full speed, I'll take 50p/call every single time.
Too bad they didn't understand how to survive what the net would change into; I miss them sometimes.
At this time in 1998 I was cueing up a whole night's worth of email attachment downloads sourced from AOL warez chatrooms (usually about 2 albums tops @ 128kbps). Never saw a single threat. 🤷♂️ Your ISP sucked, lol.
(* Means not unlimited)