[HN Gopher] 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an emai...
___________________________________________________________________
90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP's
president
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 195 points
Date : 2023-07-21 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| forgingahead wrote:
| What a lovely written article, and a nice throwback to that time
| of the "earlier" internet. I also enjoyed the photo of the author
| in the motel hunched over his laptop; certainly rings a few bells
| for myself (and perhaps others here as well).
|
| I remember arguing with my family as I was trying to play Ultima
| Online on our 28.8k connection and someone wanted to use the
| phone. Salt in the wound was when the phone call wasn't urgent
| but rather just a normal chin-wag with a friend. Was always a
| thrill to discover if during that sliver of time after school and
| sports, and before homework and dinner, and nobody was using the
| phone (and I hadn't used up my current allotment of our shared
| home PC as well), I could log into UO Sonoma and play for a short
| but glorious time, and hopefully avoid getting grief-killed as
| well.
|
| Really fun times and good memories.
| bitwize wrote:
| My wife was once on irc for so long her ISP contacted her and
| asked if she was trying to run a server.
|
| Worked out well in the end I guess, I met her on irc 25 years
| ago.
|
| As for me, well, when I was on dialup I had a brutally effective
| means to keep connection times short: an irate dad yelling "Get
| off the damn line! I need to use the phone!"
| pcdoodle wrote:
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in
| like 1996.
|
| We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried
| to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4
| hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was
| like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched
| ISPs.
|
| Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4
| times because each tried to tell us we were abusing the
| "unlimited" access. And then at some point, cable modems came out
| and the entire thing became moot.
| xxpor wrote:
| At least switching ISPs back then meant essentially signing up
| for an account and changing phone numbers. Now there's all this
| physical infra to deal with, yuck :)
| paradox460 wrote:
| In Utah, if you have Utopia, its about as easy as it was with
| Dial-up. You just go sign up a new provider, change a few
| settings on your router, and you're done.
| iso1631 wrote:
| In the UK in the early 90s we had to pay
|
| 1) The ISP a monthly charge
|
| 2) The ISP a per-minute charge (these were things like cix,
| compuserve, aol, etc)
|
| 3) the phone company a per-minute charge
|
| Later we had ISPs that didn't have a per-minute charge (Demon
| and the like), so it was just the monthly charge and the per
| minute charge to the phone company. Even later than that ISPs
| which were just a per-minute charge to the phone company came
| along. In the late 90s I think the phone company per minute
| charge was about 4p/minute in the day, so for anyone in the UK
| that would be about 9p per minute today, or if you ran your
| modem full pelt, about 36p per Megabyte.
|
| Towards the late 90s you could have a flat fee phone charge,
| then dsl and cable came along.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Demon tenner a month account revolutionized dialup internet
| in Britain during the mid-90s. Then BT announced the Friends
| and Family plan and you could add you xyz666 number to that
| plan to save 5%. Those were the days!
| DanAtC wrote:
| Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.
| thejosh wrote:
| 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 (AU Broadband forums, fondly called
| Whingepool). Phil Brett as their cofounder made this an
| incredible company, and he recently left.
|
| I pay $149AUD/month for "1000/50Mbps Unlimited", which I
| haven't had an email yet for my usage (I use around
| 4-10tb/month).
| climb_stealth wrote:
| 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.
| gs17 wrote:
| I wish, here my only option is Xfinity with 1.2 TB per month.
| ben_w wrote:
| I remember my 56k modem running at less than half the
| advertised speed, and having to pay by the minute for the
| privilege, and that the phone number originally being "local
| rate" shifting into "lo-call rate" as _actual_ local calls
| became cheaper.
|
| 2 TB would have taken me nearly 16 years, and cost as much as
| a house.
| thfuran wrote:
| Well, if you go 2 TB over, it might still cost as much as a
| house.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I lucked out and got FIOS installed on my street about 6
| months before the Xfinity caps went into effect in my area.
| When they asked me why I was canceling I tore them a new one
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Depends on your area.
|
| I'm in a suburb outside Portland, OR and have Ziply Fiber
| which sells me symmetrical gigabit with no data cap for like
| $80/month.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Here in France Free sells me 5Gb/700Mb fiber for 40EUR a
| month, and takes off 10EUR off of my phone bill for the
| trouble as well.
| jghn wrote:
| In the late 90s I moved to an area that did not yet have
| broadband, so my choices were either 56k modem or pay out the
| nose for ISDN or similar. I got a 2nd phone line, and went the
| modem route but left it connected 24/7. I kept getting banned
| from the local ISPs for this exact reason. Luckily I moved out
| of the area before I ran out of ISPs available without paying
| long distance charges!
| Arrath wrote:
| My dad ran a small business from home, I never got told to
| get off the internet so someone could make a phone call. But
| yelled at to get off the 2nd line so a fax could come in?
| Yeah, countless times.
| rus20376 wrote:
| I worked for a dial up ISP as a network engineer around the same
| time frame mentioned in the article.
|
| A standing instruction was to, as time allowed, manually look at
| usage across members and force resets on any long standing
| connections! Mainly this was because it was a small company and
| this freed up the number of possible incoming connections to
| avoid busy signals.
|
| I was very junior and cringe at how naively unaware I was of any
| ethical considerations!
| sdenton4 wrote:
| It's not necessarily unethical - it's a problem of resource
| allocation under constraints.
|
| You can either let the person who stays connected for weeks
| stick around, or free up space for less frequent users who are
| also paying customers.
| pengaru wrote:
| The overcommit ratio for its phone lines and modems is a knob
| the business selects, and it's directly linked to their
| profits.
|
| There's clearly an incentive to skimp here and resort to
| underhanded tactics. If you've promised unlimited use to the
| customer, it's definitely unethical.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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 capacity. Was over a year before a new fiber
| project between the telcos was finished before the
| situation was resolved.
| pengaru wrote:
| > 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| It is unethical to tell people something based on assumptions
| you made and then do something else when it doesn't work out.
|
| If it comes down to kicking people off, you need to reimburse
| them for their payment and say 'don't come back' and keep
| only the 'good' customers, or you need to invest in more
| phone lines and hope you make the money back.
|
| The solution is not to advertise one thing then appeal to
| 'but we actually meant this other thing' when it doesn't work
| out the the way you think it should.
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| I'd say it depends on whether they were doing it only when
| connections were near 100% utilization or if it's something
| they did arbitrarily.
|
| Seems like if you're advertising unlimited service the least
| you could do is deliver it as much as possible for extreme
| users and only bump them when they might be denying other
| customers access to the service.
|
| If it's something that happens routinely you need to expand
| your capacity to make good on your advertised offering.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > I worked for a dial up ISP as a network engineer around the
| same time frame mentioned in the article.
|
| I was an intern at a large tech company (rhymes with bun) at
| the time, and one of my tasks was to reset idle ISDN
| connections that were eating the capacity of our POPs.
| neom wrote:
| Before freeserv existed in the UK we didn't have a flat rate and
| a 800 number you could call into, you dialed a local number and
| paid by the minute, mum limited me to 2 hours a day and the she
| would take the RJ9 cable to enforce it.
|
| One afternoon at lunch break at school I went down to the local
| elections store and used 2 days worth of lunch money to buy a
| secret RJ9.
|
| After mum went to bed I'd sneak out my cable and dial up, spend
| all night online and hide it again in the morning.
|
| Well... I ran up a 500 pound bill, I came home from school at the
| end of that month to a furious mum crying because we certainly
| couldn't afford it.
|
| Mum called BT and explain what I'd done, and that it was
| unauthorized use, thank god BT nulled my contraband internet
| usage but it was a valuable lesson in doing as your parents say.
|
| Really really really greatful freeserv popped up, although they
| eventually banned me for abusing "unlimited" (then I just got my
| uncle to create a new account for me).
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Bt let me off a huge bill, too. Those were the days...
| baz00 wrote:
| Been there, done that. I was "temporarily" staying at my
| parents after a relationship had fallen through. PS375 one
| month on dialup with Pipex.
|
| The insult was followed no less than 3 days later with a
| similarly large electricity bill for the skip dived fully
| stacked Sun 1000E and disk array I was running 24/7 as a
| workstation. Stupid machine - had to sleep with ear plugs in.
| alexwasserman wrote:
| I did the same in the UK, same time period. Running up frequent
| bills and trying to carefully manage being online enough
| without hitting an unspoken PS spend threshold.
|
| But, lots of ISPs made it very easy to get online with accounts
| paid through the dial-in number, so I didn't need parent credit
| cards. Could just dial in and get access.
|
| Then we got a second line as soon as ISPs offered an 0800
| freephone number to call and she realized that the tenner a
| month for the ISP and a tenner for a second line was far
| cheaper and easier and she'd get internet too.
| pluijzer wrote:
| I feel you. Already quite some years into the age of DSL I was
| hospitalized. I needed to stay there for a couple of weeks and
| had my parents bring my laptop. There was no WiFi or anything.
| Then I that my laptop had a dial-up socket and also say the
| telephone on my night table. I introduced the two and managed
| to get online for the rest of my stay. I used it sparsely
| because I knew it would cost money.
|
| When fired from the hospital my mother was very happy I
| survived everything but she looked also very angry. I was very
| confused. Only found out later that the phone line was really
| at a premium and racked up, converted, a 2000 euro bill.
| mjfisher wrote:
| > 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!
| pluijzer wrote:
| I translated this literally from Dutch. I searched for it
| and I think it is just incorrect. Maybe English is not that
| weird anyway.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| pwrstick wrote:
| I love that this comment comes from someone who portmanteaud a
| Meyers Briggs personality type with the word "penis". It so
| perfectly matches the tone that self reflection and
| understanding have taken place without losing the rebellious
| attitude that obviously got them in trouble in the first place!
| alexose wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| locusofself wrote:
| I was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP
| service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed
| everything. Went to defcon when I was 16.
|
| I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for
| running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system
| that I had a shell account on.
|
| As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of
| interest in hacking was my saving graces in terms of
| employability, because I failed out of highschool and never
| went to college. I work at a FAANG, miraculously.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Same, had to repeat 10th grade, dropped out of 11th to get a
| job in IT and I've been living it up ever since. Not with any
| FAANG but then again I'm in Europe so we don't have such
| giants here. I work for the largest telco, partly government
| owned. (same ISP that sent me that letter;)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Same here. I got kicked off Teleport (a Portland ISP) a couple
| times. And then I got kicked off m2xenix by Randy because
| consequences didn't seem to deter me at that age.
| deckard1 wrote:
| My dad got a letter from our ISP saying someone was "hacking" a
| certain site. He asked me about it and I sheepishly denied it.
|
| The site that reported me was the owner of hax0r.com (or .org?
| Cannot remember) and various other stupid vanity domains (used
| and leased, purposely mind you, for IRC bots and things like
| that). I think they were just mad because their shell account
| was passed around IRC like the most popular whore in town.
| foobarian wrote:
| I was a little shit too. At one point I was playing a MUD from
| a university terminal, and had lag issues. I tracked down the
| slow node via traceroute, figured out the domain, and sent an
| angry email dripping with vitriol to admin@ berating their
| router, their infrastructure, etc. Actually got a reply back
| admonishing me for wasting resources :-). I wish I could track
| down the person involved today so I can apologize...
| bityard wrote:
| 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 call
| beyond a 1-mile radius or so counted as "long distance," so
| calling virtually anywhere cost a certain fixed rate per
| minute. We experimented with CompuServe and Prodigy at various
| points but the long distance charges alone made it not
| worthwhile.
|
| I eventually got to learning how physical phone lines worked
| and figured out that the same telephone box next to the road
| served both my house and the payphone for the store nearby.
| Long story short, I bridged the payphone's line to an unused
| pair at my house and started calling BBSes around the nation
| that way. I was always careful not to use it during the day,
| when someone might actually need to use the payphone.
|
| Of course, it only took a couple of months for the phone
| company to figure out something was amiss. They undid my
| handiwork and put a lock and seal on the box. They COULD have
| charged my parents with theft of service or at least delivered
| a stern warning but evidently they did not or I certainly would
| have gotten an earful over it.
|
| About a year later, the phone company brought in local dial-up
| Internet to the town.
|
| Footnote: I found a list of toll-free BBSes somewhere and there
| were HUNDREDS of numbers listed. I tried them all. Only maybe a
| dozen were actually free BBSes that you could create an account
| and log into, the rest were either dead, fax machines, or
| systems for some specific purpose. Aside from one fairly
| popular message board that eventually got shut down, it turns
| out there wasn't much to do on any of them.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| >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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I got kicked off Autobahn, an SF ISP, for doing _something_ (I
| don't remember what) in their provided shell access.
|
| Simpler times of experimentation...
| rconti wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| 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
| nocoiner wrote:
| Ha, this reminds me of getting my first ISP account cancelled
| when I exceeded their web hosting bandwidth limit. The limit was
| 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but even for back then,
| that seems awfully low...), and my pages racked up something like
| 450 MB of transfers. The network administrator was quite
| displeased with me.
|
| I don't know what's wrong with Gene Forney, I can't imagine why
| anyone wouldn't want to reminisce about those times - even if
| only as a reminder of how far we've come since then!
| Simulacra wrote:
| When I ran out of time on AOL as a kid, I just hacked someone
| else's account and used it, or used AOLHell to create a new
| account. I remember this other kids account was hacked for
| time, now he works for Google. Fun times.
| asveikau wrote:
| > I don't know what's wrong with Gene Forney
|
| Yeah, we don't have a copy of the email that was sent to him
| but the response indicates that he mistook it for some kind of
| argument. Very strange.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The limit was 150 MB (I think per month? This was 1995, but
| even for back then, that seems awfully low...)
|
| 150MB in 95 was a huge amount.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...
|
| In 2004, 9 years later the idea of 1GB of email was though of
| as insane
|
| >Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations
| for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn
| opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their
| emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under
| a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB,
| the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the
| 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.
|
| So yea, no surprise your host kicked you.
|
| *I realize this is space versus bandwidth, but they do
| correlate. Your ISP at that time may have only had T1
| connectivity
| nocoiner wrote:
| For sure, I definitely recall how space constrained things
| felt back then. Still, five megabytes of traffic per day
| doesn't feel like much of an allowance, even back then. I
| guess it was really just intended for text-only personal
| pages. I wonder what kind of hardware their web server was
| hosted on...
|
| I bet you're definitely right about my ISP being on a T1.
| What was bandwidth on those, 1.5 Mbps? I don't blame them for
| kicking me off either.
| rconti wrote:
| I worked for an ISP in the 90s as a teenager, and was also a
| backup SysOp. We had high end gear- SGI servers, racks and racks
| of USRobotics Courier modems.
|
| "Good" ISPs had a 10:1 user:modem ratio. Crappy ISPs had a 13:1
| ratio. Get much over 10:1 and you start risking busy signals. We
| didn't really track user sessions but we'd occasionally hop onto
| one of the Lucent Portmasters and if someone had an egregiously
| long session, you might reset their port.
|
| I was logged in all the time from my family home because we had a
| 2nd phone line leftover from the 1 year my dad had a home
| business. I ran the line down through some ductwork into my
| bedroom, and had switch boxes so I could switch which line went
| into the modem if I had to. From 1995 I had a Slackware Linux box
| online 24x7 and also (later, I guess) setup ipmasq and an
| ethernet interface so I could provide internet service to a 2nd
| computer we got in the late 90s (since, after all, the family
| computer had been co-opted by me, put in my bedroom, and Linux
| installed on it.
|
| It was always via modem, we could never get ISDN or DSL until
| much later (like 2002 later).
|
| A funny anecdote about leaving your modem online in those days.
| We had 2 phone lines coming into our demarc box, and the ringers
| of the phones had a strong current draw that required a capacitor
| (?) in the demarc box be topped up. We started having issues with
| quiet/silent phone rings on the "voice" line, and the modem
| dropping at the same time. Turned out having the modem on all the
| time didn't allow the capacitor to charge up, so when the phones
| in the house tried to draw a ton of current to ring the ringer
| bell, you'd basically get no current to anything, and the modem
| would fall over. Funny how primitive that sounds to describe it.
| Then again, the phone system wasn't exactly cutting edge in the
| 90s.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up),
| my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call
| from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta
| cracks and servers on the ISP webspace...
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > because my dad's son
|
| Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is
| highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my
| dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was
| your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his
| other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer
| to yourself.
| jedberg wrote:
| Most likely referring to a half-brother or step-brother.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's referring to myself, and I know you'd never use that
| wording normally, I did it for comedic effect (specifically,
| to keep the phrasing in line with the preceding parts). But
| you know what they say about German humor ...
| p1mrx wrote:
| As a broke high school student, I downloaded this Windows utility
| called JAcKED that sniffs the DUN/PPP credentials from a variety
| of free ISP dialers:
|
| https://www.docdroid.net/1JrYKEd/jacked-readme-2001-pdf
|
| You could install some ISP adware, dial in once, uninstall, and
| then stay connected 24/7 with no ads or restrictions. That worked
| for at least a year, until DOCSIS reached our area. 1500/128 kbps
| was massively better than 26/26 kbps over miles of copper.
|
| Combined with AllAdvantage and a mouse mover bot (custom VB6
| named notepad.exe to evade detection), you could "earn" like
| $8/month via questionable ethics.
| batch12 wrote:
| > "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 times'.
| wkdneidbwf wrote:
| yeah, really lame response.
| mplewis wrote:
| I know! This is so sad. One would hope they'd be happy to
| reconnect with an old customer who still remembers them from 25
| years ago.
| cobertos wrote:
| I can understand that the person's time might be limited, but
| what an awful, brusque answer. Definitely would feel
| dehumanized as the recipient
| Villodre wrote:
| 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.
| bwann wrote:
| As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win.
| Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so
| you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings
| to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have only had a couple
| dozen phone lines. For the very vast majority of subscriber,
| they'd dial up for 2-6 hours, browse the web and whatnot, and
| disconnect. I hated the "unlimited" thing at the time because it
| was so shady for reasons like this. But, if you tried to sell "X
| hours per month" people really didn't like knowing they were on
| the clock, and if you tried to market it as "unmetered" then you
| got nailed by people saying "well what's the difference between
| unmetered and unlimited??" (I tried both). In retrospect I
| probably should've just played along with "unlimited" and
| fired/ran off my customers who kept connections nailed up for 20
| hours a day.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Wouldn't another solution to have been to appeal to the courts
| or the legislature to sanction competitors who used unfair and
| misleading wording in their plan terms?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Courts typically take years to process cases like this. By
| the time dialup peaked there were cases about this, but the
| eventual solution was the market moving to high speed
| internet.
| tiernano wrote:
| Back in the late 90s, early 2ks, the cable isp in our area
| started rolling out cable internet and VoIP phones. At the time,
| the cable internet was more expensive than we could afford, but
| their digital tv service included 2 phone lines, both digital
| (not quite isdn, but 51kb/s was normal on them). They also had a
| deal where the calls to their isp was "free" but had a limit of 2
| hours and it would drop. I got my hands on an old 486 pc, added a
| modem and a nic and set it up using a router os running off a
| floppy. Can't remember the name off hand now. Anyway, every time
| it dropped, it reconnected and I was back online. Fast forward 2
| months and the first phone bill arrived. It arrived in a large a4
| envelope with about 100 pages in it. I opened it and the first
| set of pages was the internet line. Every 2 hours a line item.
| During the evening I was charged 1c per min. So a shite load of
| times for 2.40. Then in the day it was 4c per hour. So more
| charges for 4.80... and it just went on from there. 90 something
| odd pages of this. Last line item: total nearly 5 grand! And then
| after it, credit for the same amount. They didn't charge for the
| calls. The next bill came out and they stopped itemizing the
| bill. Bit of a panicky moment before the credit was applied. Was
| on that for 3 or 4 months then moved to cable Modem. Fun times.
| bombcar wrote:
| Something similar happened with Cingular's systems and the
| iPhone if I remember - the printed bill would list every
| kilobyte even though not charged.
| shultays wrote:
| For me even the weirder part that the CEO knows the author's
| email program has an interval of 10mins. This CEO checked what
| kind of traffic is being used. Hopefully he wasn't interested in
| un-encyrypted traffic data as well!
| bwann wrote:
| Most people tended to use their own ISP's mail servers back
| then. Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL were the only third-party email
| services around, before the likes of Gmail took off. It would
| be trivial to go look at mail server logs to see if X login was
| connecting every X minutes.
|
| Encryption was seldom used there for POP3/IMAP/SMTP because hey
| you're on the same ISP network and not crossing the Internet.
| Further it was pretty easy to hop on a terminal server like a
| Portmaster and do a debug/packet dump of individual dialup
| connections if somebody really wanted to see what somebody was
| doing.
| rob wrote:
| I miss the 90s/2000s.
|
| Like when you could register restricted AOL/AIM names by
| simplying changing <input name="screen_name"
| value="restricted_name_here"> in the form's code before
| submitting.
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| The ISP president called me at home when it was a teen to tell me
| "don't do that[0] again".
|
| I looked him up recently. He's a big player in SV now.
|
| [0] little demonstration that their Windows domain shouldn't be
| on the same subnet as their users.
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| I got a call from my mom and pop dial-up ISP in 1999 when I hit
| one of their BO2k honeypots.
|
| Back Orifice 2000 was a widespread script kiddie Trojan that
| gave clients a menu of mischievous features like changing
| people's desktop wallpaper or ejecting their CD tray, and
| malevolent ones like deleting files or dumping their stored
| passwords.
|
| I thought I was invincible because I got away with wardialing
| all through the 90's and tried to keep my hat grey by not
| pulling any of the malevolent tricks, but boy did I ever hit
| that "eject CD tray" button every single time I found a BO2k
| server.
|
| Fortunately for me I answered the phone when they called
| instead of my parents, and they were content with reminding me
| it was a TOS violation and letting me off with a warning.
|
| In hindsight it was probably unusually civic-minded of them to
| run a honeypot and use it to catch kids and just tell them to
| knock it off if they wanted to keep their dial-up access.
| js2 wrote:
| I could have been the person that sent that email (but I wasn't).
| In college getting my CS degree in the mid-90s, I had a job as
| the sole sysadmin at a small in-town ISP at a company that had
| the ISP as a side-business of its main business which was
| embedded systems development.
|
| The ISP consisted of two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston
| Portmaster, two dozen Hayes 56K modems and a single T1.
|
| I would have been the person reviewing access logs each morning
| and would have noticed someone connected for 20 hours that hadn't
| been sending any traffic.
|
| Yet, I don't recall every having to send such an email. We _may_
| have auto-disconnected sessions after a period of time to let
| other callers connect, but I don't recall.
| jwineinger wrote:
| Back around 2000-2002, I too had dial-up internet and had set up
| an auto-dialer to make sure the connection stayed up, as it was
| being shared throughout the house via ethernet and wifi. My
| memory is that we started getting very large bills. When we asked
| about them, we were told that it was because we had several
| concurrent connections.
|
| What was happening is that my script to detect the connection
| being down was finding that and reconnecting before their system
| could mark the disconnection. Then my computer would reconnect
| and they'd never see the original disconnection, and so they'd
| think we had concurrent sessions and charged us accordingly. I
| remember them being surprised when they figured out that bug in
| their stuff. I think it helped that all of the connections came
| from the same phone number.
| zooFox wrote:
| Back in the day (early 2000s), my classmate had a plan that had a
| limited bandwidth. That also meant there was a dashboard that you
| could use to monitor the usage. My classmate clearly didn't like
| it, because his parents could see when he was playing RuneScape.
| I had unlimited plan and had no monitoring in place.
|
| So I suggested him he could exceed the limit through downloading
| some [i]stuff[/i]. Knowing him, he went overboard and racked up a
| good bill. Think of someone's earnings of working for half a
| year, full time, at the minimal wage at the time.
|
| ISP didn't budge but they eventually found a way to upgrade to an
| unlimited plan and drop the bill for going over. Two happy
| kids...
| jdjdjdhhd wrote:
| Never had this issue in the 90s in Canada... We had a phone line
| dedicated to internet
| Digital28 wrote:
| Never had this issue in the 90s in Texas, either. We also had a
| dedicated line so the Internet could always be on.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 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 roommate is online for long
| periods of time or downloads a lot of data or something.
| Apparently the roommate is into RPGs and forums of whatever kind.
|
| I've encouraged her to give in and get that broadband. Her
| wireless voice calls are spotty and sometimes I can't understand
| her. But she's good with the _status quo_.
| Sakos wrote:
| I checked the big ISP in my area and I can't even find a way to
| book dial-up. Is that still a thing in places?
|
| edit: Oh, apparently there's still a handful here?
| https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/einwahlnummern.html
| dylan604 wrote:
| what geographic region are you (or "your friend") located with
| dial-up access?
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| https://www.interwrx.com/residential.php
| tguvot wrote:
| Used to work in local branch of first of Israeli ISPs . Entire
| dial-in modem pool was in one room office on wire cart. Two
| dozens of US Robotics. When me or any of coworkers couldn't get a
| line, we used to call office and random modem will be power
| cycled.
|
| Don't remember if packages were unlimited or not, but phone line
| definitely wasn't. I still remember how my mother was unhappy
| with 1200NS phone bill (almost minimal salary at this time frame)
| halyconWays wrote:
| It really wasn't that unreasonable to be online for many hours of
| the day in 1998. I suppose it was still a burden on small ISPs,
| but I'd have expected a lot more eyebrow-raising in the early
| 90s. Early in the decade something was seriously wrong with you
| if you were "talking to strangers on your computer" for ANY
| amount of time.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This made me curious about setting up a landline again at my
| house (cause those work even in blackouts) and there are still a
| few options
|
| My favorite by far is basicISP:
|
| https://www.basicisp.net/About/BasicServices.aspx
|
| This is a time capsule of a website (and company for that
| matter!) that apparently is still actively maintained!
| angarg12 wrote:
| In the 90s I had internet at home at a time when almost all of my
| friends (school children) didn't even have a computer. Trying to
| explain the internet to someone who doesn't have a computer is
| still one of the most alien experiences of my life.
| anthk wrote:
| To me internet in ~1997-8 was like a cross between a full
| duplex teletext crossed with multimedia and magazines.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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 and per-user while network congestion is temporary and
| local. Better sell unlimited data plans with different speeds
| (priced accordingly), and only apply those speed limits if the
| local cell becomes congested.
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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 sudden influx of
| users with available quota overload a cell, meaning they
| aren't getting the service they paid for as they are
| getting degraded speeds. On the other hand, someone who
| used up all their monthly quota is still getting no or
| degraded service (or is charged overage fees) despite being
| on a cell with lots of available capacity - in this case
| both energy and spectrum is wasted because there is an idle
| cell that's not being used to its full capacity despite
| there being demand for it.
|
| > soft caps
|
| Soft caps are, at least in some carriers, either non-
| existent (you get a hard block or are charged insane
| overage fees) or are throttled to near-unusable speeds.
| Furthermore, even if soft caps are implemented, they are
| still global (and reset monthly) as opposed to being
| limited to congested areas.
|
| The real reason for data caps isn't network congestion but
| to scare people into paying for more than they really need
| (which _conveniently_ resets every month, so they can 't
| accumulate their allowance either) and/or charge them huge
| overage fees if they dare exceed their allowance. If this
| was purely about congestion control and efficient spectrum
| usage, there are better ways such as the one I described in
| my original comment.
|
| Unfortunately in an oligopoly controlled by a handful of
| equally-mediocre players who have no incentive (nor
| capability - there is no engineering culture to enable
| innovation) to compete with each other, there is no
| feasible way to fix this.
| placesalt wrote:
| These (and the ones in the GGP post) are very good
| points.
|
| To play devil's advocate,
|
| - With data plans based on minimum speed, there would
| still be a possibility of service being degraded below
| the paid-for minimum speed during times of high usage at
| a cell site. There would have to be an asterisk in the
| contract to the effect that minimum speeds would only be
| supplied while possible. And, ideally, some regulatory
| oversight to ensure sufficient cell site capacity is
| installed based on the cumulative speed of the plans
| sold, if that makes sense.
|
| - I wonder, to what degree is the structure of cell phone
| data plans constrained by regulation and private
| agreements? IOW, are carriers allowed, under current
| regulation, to sell minimum-speed plans? How complicated
| and time-consuming would it be to unwind inter-carrier
| cell-site-sharing agreements?
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| ceautery wrote:
| This is the first time I've seen a WorldsAway reference outside
| of my friend group of former CompuServe employees.
|
| I remember during that time first switching over to cable
| internet, and how my provider was adamant that you not run a web
| server, and their tech support would drop you like a hot potato
| if you mentioned that you used a router. Such a different world.
|
| That was a fun article, thanks for posting!
| brycewray wrote:
| Another saver of long-ago emails here, going back to my initial
| Internet use in December, 1995, with what then was gte.net. My
| first modem achieved 14.4Kbps at best, but only if it wasn't
| raining; for some reason, speeds dropped dramatically when the
| outside phone lines got wet. Thought I was in tall cotton when I
| got a 33.6Kbps modem. Even then, it still took over two hours to
| download each new version of whichever browser I was using at the
| time, and I'd have to wait until fairly late on Sunday night so
| neither wife nor daughter would need to use the phone.
| catiopatio wrote:
| > ... speeds dropped dramatically when the outside phone lines
| got wet.
|
| It's not uncommon (even today) for insulation to fail somewhere
| on the line, which allows for water intrusion and transient
| shorts.
| josefresco wrote:
| I almost missed my first (and most important) job offer in the
| summer of 2000 because I was on dial-up almost 24 hours a day and
| my phone was constantly busy. I applied for a new job and left my
| home phone number which was also my dialup line. Thankfully my
| new boss was able to finally get through, and my career in tech
| was born!
|
| And it wasn't even 56K because our phone lines were crap. I would
| get about 28K on a _good day_.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| I had to share a line with my parent's business. I bought this
| little box off ebay that listened for the call waiting signal
| and then dropped the internet to let the call through. Had to
| remember to disable the disable call waiting option in modem
| settings IIRC.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I did dial-up ISP support in the late 1990s. We did regularly end
| connections for those who were on long hours, but didn't stop
| them from reconnecting.
| OJFord wrote:
| If they genuinely could tell it was not being actively used (or
| really, even if they wanted to limit to x hours whether used or
| not and that's what's going on here) why not just disconnect it,
| why resort to emailing the user?
|
| It sort of implies that's not possible, but really? I can't
| imagine how you could be doing the routing, monitoring the
| connection, and yet unable to terminate it?
| jghn wrote:
| Some of us had our server detect when the connection was
| dropped for any reason and would autoconnect back in.
| OJFord wrote:
| And the ISP monitoring would be sophisticated enough to know
| that was what you were doing, but again, still not to
| disconnect you again (or not quickly enough, or something)?
| kazinator wrote:
| How about 1980s. I seem to recall that some hobbyist BBS
| operators operating off residential phone lines were investigated
| by phone companies and harassed into paying for business phone
| lines.
| Simulacra wrote:
| What a silly email from a CEO.
| koonsolo wrote:
| 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.
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