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Comment by jeff_marshall | Hacker News Reader

I have fond memories of the transition from local BBSes (my parents were annoyed enough by my constant phoning of the local BBS to download commander keen and the like), to IP connectivity via Trumpet. The reach of the internet (esp IRC!) was mind-blowing for someone living in a relatively isolated community in Alaska at the time.

I feel like I don't fully appreciate the gradual transition from dial-up and Trumpet to LTE and a supercomputer in my pocket :) I wonder what people born today will experience that has as great of an impact.

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Heh. "local" -- ~1988 I was calling into BBSs in San Jose from Tahoe... the phone bill got to $926!

I was grounded for a month.

We wanted to play trade wars and the pit. Super fun.

I also used to call up 411 (information, where you would call 411 and say "do you have a number for John Smith in lake tahoe ca?") -- and I would chat up the 411 operators for as long as possible - the contest being to see how long we could keep the op on the phone.

Then I tried to make blue boxes.

I racked up a hefty bill one month for my mom back in day connecting to the net at all times of the night. The old Web was such a glorious thing. My favorite activity was to download images and animated GIFs so that I could have them forever. You just never knew if you'd find them again and having access to new content was a novel concept to me. I still have that folder. Backed up over 17 years just because I still can't let go of them.

Now I just play survival games and hoard items. I have no fear that I won't be able to find something I saw on the Web. It's harder to lose things forever. Such a different world and one I could not have imagined.

Upload them to imgur. I'm sure it'll be a trip down memory lane for a lot of us.

That's a great idea. The backup is on my desktop so I'll have to wait until I can access it. Would love to share it.

Where I live (lived) there's no such thing as free local calls. Whenever you dialed anything the meter started counting. I became very good at mentally preparing what I wanted to download before dialing :-)

That was pre-internet, at least where I lived, and we all used Fidonet[1]. Cant recall my node, it's been too long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

I was a bit late to the internet game (I think ~1997), but this was the same in the UK too. Most ISPs had expensive subscriptions which gave you access to a freephone number. In 1998, AOL was £16.95 a month [0].

I can't remember who I started out with, but I switched to FreeServe after they launched. They provided subscription free access to a local rate number (which confusingly doesn't have to be geographically local), and made money by getting a cut of the call rates. I don't think they were the first to do this, but they had a partnership with one of the main computer retailers. They were so successful an investigation was launched by the regulator [1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980111054950/http://www.aol.co...

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/255200.stm

They provided subscription free access to a local rate number

And most [Well at that time really just BT or Cable/Wireless] telcos gave you free local calls. You just had to make sure you wasn't connected for more than an hour. I remember a program would disconnect and connect your modem every X minutes.

I remember back then [and to this day] my mind being blown that I was chatting to someone and there is a physical connection between us - there was a signal I was sending that had to use a physical wire connection all the way to their computer, so we could discuss topics we had only just discovered. Yes we felt special.

For me the 'magic' of the internet is now lost on people. It may not be a bad thing; I don't know, but it's accepted now we are always connected.

Back then, when you connected to the real internet [not AOL etc] it was like walking into the biggest library you had ever known and if you chose to be alone to take in that knowledge - you could. If you also wanted to engage with other people in the library - you would be polite and there was a mutual respect for you and your opinions. You could then leave the library and return when/if you wanted.

Rose tinted glasses maybe - but it's a very different Internet now.

I was curious about the state of POTS today and it's pretty much the same as it was twenty years ago. Separate local and long-distance plans. Night & weekend rates. Metered calls are all around $0.10/min. Even that abhorrent "local extended" tier that was the source of countless unexpectedly high bills.

In 1994 I called a remote system in Washington state (we were living in Tennessee) because I wanted to download a patch for Outpost [0] that added some of the enhancements that were supposed to be in the game from the beginning. I couldn't find it anywhere on the Internet at the time, but if you called this specific BBS in Washington, you could download it.

It took several hours to download. The total bill for that was like $50 or something. I had no idea it was going to be that much. I got in so much trouble for that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_%28video_game%29

I remember the first time I did the email around the world trick. Back then you could telnet to port 25 and type in a smtp header with a source route and send an email that would bounce across a dozen mail servers as it circumnavigated the globe. Fun times.

Yes!

I did the telnet thing to mail servers while I was in high school to good effect ;). I would almost certainly cringe if I could see those mails today.

Showing the school IT department what could be done with a semicolon in a URL on their servers would have gotten me suspended if it weren't for some understanding teachers. Thank god I only put a fork bomb (cringe of 2016 me is real) in there.

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