I wonder what younger people think about the fact you had to pay for the internet by the hour back in the day
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in reply to @dog's post:
That's what you get when you base the Internet on the phone system (the only easily available infrastructure at the time capable of both receiving and sending signals).
...Did you know that Internet browsers used to come on disks? And that people were giving these away like candy at a certain point?
i DID know that, i am old enough that when i was a small child i lived in a house full of AOL free trial CDs
Ah yes, I remember when USA Ultimate partnered with AOL to help spread the love of Ultimate Frisbee to every home. (We used to say "the free frisbee is here!")
Early ISPs would either have you pay by the minute/hour, or give you a certain number of hours included and then charge you by the minute/hour for anything that goes over that. It's not too different from how stuff has a data cap now.
Oh and I don't know if you've ever heard the jokes about free AOL CDs, but their deal back in the day was they handed out trial CDs like candy that would come with, like. 250 or 1000 free hours or something.
i am just old enough to remember the deluge of AOL free trial CDs. i didn't remember their billing model though!
In retrospect the whole thing is really weird. It cost real money to make and distribute those! I wonder just how much money they wasted
i suppose that makes sense because it worked through the phone system. ah what we take for granted these days
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Listen I know I'm old and you're probably just joking around but this legit isn't a very nice thing to randomly say to someone
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Come on now. When someone expresses that they're upset by a thing someone else said, your response is to pop in to say "No, it's normal, you just shouldn't be upset"? Regardless of intent, folks should apologize when they upset someone, even if it's accidental. That's, like, basic courtesy.
I was for sure on the late end of it but I remember getting some captain crunch with the crunching adventure cd with 250 hours of AOL lmaooo shit was crazy
This is a big part of why my parents didn't want to get Internet access at home. I think they held out until we could have an unmetered connection.
My parents could not comprehend how it was that I was accessing data in Europe over the phone line and yet they were not getting enormous long-distance bills
Have you tried asking them if they know about internet cafes? That's how I paid by the hour. I don't think that was a thing for home ISPs (mine was unlimited dialup and I only used it in the evenings when we knew no one would call us.)
Internet cafes had a super long tail here in BC, though I think they're finally mostly dead now. I bet more younger people than average would recognize them here just because you could still see them around until pretty recently.
REALLY. Huh. Interesting. They finally died out here around the time of covid; internet access here is extremely cheap. Even the cheapest cell phone plans have enough bandwidth and they offered unmetered Facebook access, etc.
There's still a few stragglers, but they're mostly set up near schools so kids can print things.
my son asked why they stopped doing that when they probably could make more money that way and i just stared into the middle distance for a while
tbh data caps and getting to charge by the megabyte when you go over is about as good for them these days. They’ve reinvented it well
