Compuserve was my first access.  Then one day I discovered that my C$ access number was actually a portal to the "internet" via CPN (Compuserve Packet Network)

I once got some pic of a chicken getting boned by a dog so I emailed it to my buddy. His wife opened it,  and it was a video, oops. I didn't know the difference. But it was really bad and she didn't talk to me for a long while.

Yep, me too - although I started as Netscape before they were bought out by AOL.
It took me a few tries to remember the AOL sign-in and password, but I finally got in and my account still works.

Up until just a short time ago we still had Earthlink dial-up even after the phone company finally brought in broadband (more as a back-up for the wife's computer (Windows XP) They had some program that supposedly
speeded up the service but it was a real drag. Couldn't play on-line games, or download much. I remember downloading some mod for a game that took three days, yeah, those were the good old days all right lol!

I remember having a 14.4 modem and primitive web access in 1994. Text-only pages and hyperlinks. It was either earthlink or compuserve.

I thought I was hot stuff in 2000 when I had a 56k PCMCIA card in my laptop and a second phone line just for internet.

I remember Free I.  

Fun fact. You could just use standard windows dialing app. User and password were the same and the whole front end was just a wrapper. Free and no ads!

If you go over your limit on Hughesnet, they let you experience what it was like.

I once got all future employment contracts for my school that way. Admin was pissed but the teachers wanted the DL.

ETA

It's an even worse idea to make a sorted by salary spreadsheet and mark who is staying/leaving and then taping printouts to lockers all over.

I lived way out in the middle of nowhere.

Best I could get was 28.8K. I subscribed to the Proxyconn service which speeded things up considerably, although not music or video streaming.

I can remember many nights, before going to bed, connecting to the Internet and opening up Kazaa, leaving it running all night so I could download music. I would also leave it running while I was at work.

Most of the time, I could download a whole album in 24 hours...lol.

I have one of those ^. Kaypro II. I need to find or make a KB cable. Not only is it 64KB of RAM, the Z80 CPU rant at an amazing 2MHz.

My current CPU - a Ryzen 9 3900x - by comparison has 64GB and runs at ~4GHz...

m

ETA: I just checked:

Each CPU core has 64k L1 cache (32+32), 512K L2 cache, and the L3 cache is 64MB.

Now I find out!

Attached File

Hahaha . . . The only computer class that I ever took was as a college sophomore in the fall of 1968. The computer filled half the basement of the School of Engineering building and had to be kept at a constant temperature of 72 degrees.  It's only form of input was via punch cards and its only output was through a dot-matrix printer.

What’s the “God/Love” thing?

TELNET was the predecessor to the dark web.  =D

That price.

God, love, sex. Popularized in the movie Hackers as the top three passwords. 'Cause sysadmins love that stuff.

ETA my teenage self can't resist:
ETAx2 cause goatboy's code sucks digital donkey dick at mobile paste:

==Phrack Inc.==

                   Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The following was written shortly after my arrest...


                      \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/


                                     by


                              +++The Mentor+++


                         Written on January 8, 1986
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


       Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
       Damn kids.  They're all alike.


       But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
       I am a hacker, enter my world...
       Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
       Damn underachiever.  They're all alike.


       I'm in junior high or high school.  I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work.  I did it in my head..."
       Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They're all alike.


       I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is
cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...
               Or feels threatened by me...
               Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
               Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
       Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike.


       And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
       "This is it... this is where I belong..."
       I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
       Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again.  They're all alike...


       You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.


       This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.


       Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.


       I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.


                              +++The Mentor+++

Before AOL, it was called PC-Link, which was a primitive version of AOL. It came bundled with Tandy's DeskMate shell, sort of a Windows-ish program launcher. I got it with a Tandy 1000 TL/2 computer I got in 1989. I then bought a 2400 baud modem that fit in one of the ISA slots and I was off to the races. With an Epson 24 pin DMP with tractor feed and WordPerfect 4.2, you had a serious term paper machine. I like to tell people I had email at my apartment in 1989. This was also towards to tail end of the BBS era. They were still popular and ubiquitous, but CompuServe and Prodigy were around then and BBSs were no longer the only online game in town anymore. PC-Link was 10 cents a minute when connected, so people tended to be a lot more productive when they were online. I think CompuServe was even more. PC-Link was rolled into AOL sometime in 1993, I think. Back then, you tended to do as much offline as you could, like compose emails. Then you'd log on, allowing everything to upload and download. The local BBS community was where most people spent time because it was usually free. I remember, back in 1985, seeing a multi-line local BBS accessed through an IBM PC-jr. I was blown away that such a thing existed. People were communicating via text in real time! That was a big deal back in those days.

The plant that made those disks was in Dothan, AL.  They were shipping millions per month to AOL.

Ebaumsworld

Who remembers Geocities?

Wow! 15 million characters?

Nobody could ever fill that up!

In middle school, I was spending some time inside these. So freaking nerdy looking back at it.  But I wasn't a nerd at all. Well, On the outside anyhow.



Some are still operating. You can use a modem or telnet.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-modern-bbses-worth-calling-today

My home happened to have 2 phone lines.  So I was able to be the big boy on the block with "Shotgun Modems".  Basically one modem dedicated for upload and another for download.

Anyone think an Arfcom BBS would be popular?  lol  Might be the only way to organize going forward with all this censorship.

My  first modem was 300 baud. I remember being really excited when I got ahold of a 9600 baud one LOL.

I recently sent it off to computer recycling , was going to keep it as an antique but I really dont have room.

My folks still use it for email, but I think the search engine is long gone.
We had dial up until 12 years ago then DSL until a couple of months ago when fiber was run through the area. DSL was OK, and when it was good, I really don't notice much difference. When traffic is high, there is no comparison, not that there is anyway. Phone and internet is cheaper than the other company as well.

Early 80's I used a 110 baud modem on a vic-20 to get onto compuserve service and paid by the hour for service. Old 110 baud converted teletype modem. About the time the PC was first coming out, 1981/1982 ish. You can read faster than the words come out. A few BBS's once the PC got out and about and the clones. Moved up to 300 baud then 1200, then 9600 baud. Vic 20k with 2k of memory and no hardd drive, no disk drive, a tape drive. I was about 10 or 11 when I got into it.

Rural area I had two phone lines. Because it was rural they had a deal for a talk only plain phone line $7/month. I had to switch out the numbers switched on them. The old main line was too noisy, the 2nd line was put in when the house was built but it was cleaner, run 1/4 mile down the driveway to the phone box.

Ran a Fido.net node for a while.

First hard drive for a PC I got from a neighbor cause the company he was CEO was changing them out. 5mb. Beat the dual floppy.

I recall that, vaguely.

I didn’t have internet till 2000, college dorm T1 connection.

My high school didn’t have internet till 1999.

My current home has no access to wired/fiber internet.  No cable, no DSL, nothing.  I have to use satellite (sucks, not worth it) or cell network.

For sure. Don't forget angelfire too

That's about what I had except 486 100mhz with 8 mb ram.

Anyone remember 2600, the hacker quarterly? I had a buddy who had a subscription and he was always showing me how he could make free phone calls with homemade tone generators and stuff. It was the Wild West.

Attached File


Attached File

I even remember going to “parties” (more of a meet and greet) for local BBSes in my town in the early 1990s. They were basically adult A/V Clubs

1995 magicnet.
And try you very much for the memory of that FUKKING so irritating sound that is stuck in my head for the next her days now like the song dancing queen was.
Have a nice day .
Dammit

You beat my funny rant my friend

OFFS I rost hard

FIFY

I remember using 300 baud acoustic coupling modem to dial into electronic bulletin boards around 1987.

Commodore 64 master race here

Would dial in at night as to not tie up the phone line all day.  Would take almost all night to download just one mp3 off Napster.

Sparkly banners everywhere.

Phones with acoustical couplers, then a 300 baud modem, then 1200, then gasp 2400 baud.  Things were great when they got to the point I didn't have to stop reading occasionally to let the data stream catch up.  Work got a 56k line, which was ludicrous speed!

I saved programs that I wrote on audio cassette tapes using a computer to radio shack cassette player on a TI 99 somewhere around 82 or 83, because trs80 and c 64 were supercomputer expensive in my parents budget mind.   Not trying to outdo you.  It all sucked, but it was the only suck we had.

I've only had a high speed internet connection for like 2 years. I live 2 miles from the city center. No boonies, no mountains one would have to climb, no pit fall traps to avoid, but in a dead area as far as getting anything wired. AT&T was going to run fiber optic like 10/15 years ago. Even went so far as to plant little yellow flags, but shit never materialized.

It was dial up and Opera with all photos blocked as far as surfing goes. No youtube, no netflix, no nothing. Ordering a single product from Amazon took an hour if you had to search for and compare products. Everyone up my road was passed on by, but we do have very good cell signals. I have a phone on my plan that acts as wifi for the whole house, and it not used for anything else.