I remember using dial up in the early '90s in Europe, possibly even including using a long distance calling card!
In Fact, another interesting question comes up on this… what did we early adopters do with our Macs before Internet and so on… seems these days a large portion of our tech revolves around internet access.
As a college journalism major, I think I was using my early Macs for variations on desktop publishing. I like putting together documents in interesting layouts with photos and text and that may well have been an early usage. As a pilot, I think I also was trying out flight sims.
There was also something there about making videos, in the tape days. I was making video on tape and editing it with a VCR and TV.
Well anyway that’s maybe more subjects than a Topic is allowed!
Somehow (I forget!) I used a dial-up modem and a Sinclair Spectrum in the mid-1980s to do (very limited) banking and view teletext news and weather.
In the 1990s I subscribed to a data-based dial-up account with an Australian ISP. After a few years, I stopped using it for internet access when better services became available. This meant my data limit never expired and I was able to use “free” email and web page hosting until a few years ago when, like AOL, they closed down the service.
The AP media release about AOL, with some interesting background, is here:
Played games, wrote academic papers, did some math and statistics, graphed stuff, published a newsletter. Dialed into online bulletin boards, the university network, and services like Compuserve, GEnie, etc. Tended to focus on doing individual tasks as focused effort, rather than being distracted by a million notifications, tweets, emails, etc.
I can’t help but feel that in many ways, I was more creative and productive using a Mac Plus or a Mac SE/30 than I have been with more “advanced” tools.
I’m reminded of some articles about using an old PowerBook and a IIsi by Andrew Cunningham. It’s interesting to see how hard it can be for someone younger to imagine working without an Internet connection.
I was into the BBS scene in college and for several years afterward.
At my first post-college job, we had dial-up access to our work network. Sort of. We had a single modem configured with “call back” security - you call in and provide your user ID and password. It hangs up and calls you back (so you have to be at the phone number you have registered) and you have your modem answer the call.
This would give me a Unix shell prompt on one of the company’s Sun servers. From there, I could log-in to the workstation on my desk. For more robust Internet access, I would manually run the pppd daemon on my workstation and a PPP client on my home PC to establish a TCP/IP connection to the company network (and therefore, the Internet). It worked slowly (since I was using a 14.4K modem at the time), but it worked. Good enough for mail and news, but not suitable for web browsing.
I later stopped using that when a local ISP (Erol’s Internet) provided a great deal, including a plan where I pre-paid for three years up front. I quickly purchased a 56K modem at that point.
I continued to use that modem (a Zoom K56 Flex) with Erol’s Internet (later purchased by RCN) until I got my first broadband connection. But that’s another story for another time.
I still have that modem. Today, just as a collectable. I kept it long past getting broadband with the idea that I might want to use it to send/receive faxes. But that never happened.
Sigh. Another thread for all us old folk to wallow in nostalgia. Which we apparently love to do.
So many memories. Chasing after the ever-elusive lowest rate for long distance calls to BBS’s. Anyone remember PC Pursuit? It’s shutdown by Sprint in 1994 led to my first attaboy from @ace.
Definitely fun. But some of these are not (yet) artifacts. For instance, Usenet still exists, and probably will continue forever, even though it isn’t nearly as popular as it once was.
The main reason I bought my 512K Mac in 1985 was to use a 1200-baud modem to transmit news stories to New Scientist magazine in London using a service that I think was called DialCom, which was aimed at businesses and publishers. I had been filing stories from Boston by airmail to London, but I that didn’t work well for a weekly magazine when air mail took several days. At first I needed separate services to send each magazine I wrote for. GEnie had a thriving science-fiction channel. It took a while to get internet access for non-academics. I used Software Tool & Die, which claimed to be the first to offer access to the Internet. I rarely used AOL.
I miss the days where I was a BBS sysop. We bought me a computer with a lot of the money we received as wedding gifts (my mother in law thought my wife was nuts, but since I parlayed it into a career I guess it was a good investment). Kaypro with 2 5.25" floppies. I started running the bulletin board (WWIV software) when it was still on 2 floppies. One of my instructors at the university let me “borrow” an external 10GB full height drive they weren’t using, which connected with a ribbon cable to the card in the computer. I had a 2nd phone line installed in the house, and ended up using PC Pursuit from Telenet (BBN) to keep the costs down ( … for a flat monthly fee, customers could dial into the Telenet network in one city, then dial out on the modems in another city to access BBSs and other services). PC Pursuit was really the only way to have BBS networking be price competitive at the time - the BBS would batch updates and then dial up to other hub systems (my system was a hub system for area code 309) to send the batches.
The first system had a 300 baud modem. Upgrading to 2400 bps was “life changing”, until I won a US Robotics Courier V.34 at a tradeshow, which was just phenomenal at the time. I still have my second USR Courier V.Everything modem as a conversation piece, along with my original breadboarded DSL modem - I upgraded to DSL when it was being offered as a test (essentially a beta test) by GTE back in 1998. At the time, there were no commercial DSL modems - the telco engineers built the modems from scratch. I kept the breadboarded modem even after commercial modems became available because it was ROCK SOLID.
Good times…
PC Pursuit probably saved my marriage (and my finances) because running a BBS hub system was ruining me financially until I discovered PC Pursuit. I found out about it probably in the very early 1990s from one of the other sysops in my area - remember the days when we would actually get together for a meal and talk about things (we’re talking Golden Buffet here)? I was heartbroken when they discontinued it, although by that point the BBS software had evolved to use better compression and the long distance charges weren’t quite so ruinous.
