Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979 | Hacker News Reader

Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979

oldvcr.blogspot.com

112 pointszdw41 comments

> Messages to a single user were free, but every subsequent recipient of a message was a 15-cent ($0.59 in 2022) surcharge per message, per recipient. (Imagine the impact that would have had on spam and unsolicited commercial E-mail.)

The dichotomy of the early Internet was astounding at times. Those strange beings who made things like WWW pages for free, just because it was fun, standing alongside corporations trying to make absolutely insane profits off everything that you did, where you were billed per minute by the ISP, the platform, and maybe the thing hosted by the platform as well.

CompuServe and Minitel being only a single bill from your ISP might well have saved the networks from becoming the fad that so many originally saw them as.

Though... The needle might be drifting back towards many bills from many providers, again. Maybe bundling will once again decide which corporations thrive, and which are lost... Probably not the ones that serve public interest.

I highly doubt this will be new to anyone on HN, but Halt and Catch Fire, at least to my layperson eyes, did a pretty good job of showing this era and the challenges/solutions that were cropping up.

For those who are familiar I’m thinking of season 2 where Mutiny is trying to keep their service running and keeps running into issues, whether it be phone companies, server rentals, building and managing their own servers, etc. The amount of time they spent fighting companies or trying to find ways to keep their service from completely crashing - let alone stay even remotely solvent - as they were hit on all sides with costs was striking. I felt they did a good job giving a non-technical overview of the issues, as well as making it sort of exciting.

Great show and super underrated.

Probably my favorite show to have on in the background when I'm color-grading or doing other work where I can afford to be a tad distracted!

Babylon Berlin would probably be my go to for that (assuming I had already seen it)

That show has been out a while but seems to have picked up a lot of steam lately for some reason. I keep hearing about it. Guess it’s time to start!

Season 1 is best honestly - been following it since they released originally on Netflix - hoping they do more - the set design and atmosphere is amazing

> Maybe bundling will once again decide which corporations thrive, and which are lost.

Bundling is definitely a thing, here in Canada[0][1], and I expect that it will be a determining factor in services succeeding.

0: Telus and Prime https://www.telus.com/en/deals-and-bundles/optik-internet-am...

1: Bell and Crave https://www.bell.ca/Bell_Internet/Promotions/

"where you were billed per minute by the ISP, the platform, and maybe the thing hosted by the platform as well."

And don't forget the phone companies. The idea of unlimited all-you-can-eat on a POTS line wasn't implemented everywhere, and it only made sense when you were on for thousands of minutes a month. On top of that not every town had a local portal to Source, Telenet, Compu-Serve, etc so it was a crazy-expensive toll call to get connected in the first place.

“corporations trying to make absolutely insane profits off everything that you did, where you were billed per minute by the minute”

At least in the case of The Source, it looks like they were leasing time from another company’s minicomputers. We don’t know their expenses so can’t assume they were making insane profits. As I recall, some IBM systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent per month.

However, with the point I was trying to make, IBM was recouping their costs on those rentals within a year or two. They had a "disappointing" $2bn profit in a single quarter of 1979 [0] (very roughly, about $7Bn in today's currency), on $16Bn of revenue.

They weren't exactly thin margins.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/12/archives/ibm-net-falls-18...

I read your $2B in 1979 is $7B today and thought “that can’t be right!” (Thinking that was much too high.) It turns out that it’s almost $8B in actuality, making me far more wrong than I thought.

Near as I can determine, The Source never turned a profit. CompuServe eventually did.

I remember my first $900 phone bill because I had never heard of thing call "local long distance" until I moved to California.

> (Imagine the impact that would have had on spam and unsolicited commercial E-mail.)

Simple: The spammers would have bought contracts to send spam at a flat rate and spam blocking technology would have gotten people kicked from the service. Only the absolutely poorest scammers would have been blocked, so the service would attempt to stop the 419 scammers actually from Nigeria, whereas the penis pill peddlers would have had a clear line to everyone.

1979 was the first year I touched a computer--a Decwriter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECwriter#/media/File:Decwrite...) that was the flagship of my high school's nascent 'Computer Club', of which I was a proud founding member.

If you're unfamiliar with it, the Decwriter was basically a (very) wide-carriage printer with a keyboard attached, situated at desk height. It connected to our school district's RSTS system (resource sharing/time sharing) via an acoustic modem: you'd dial the phone, wait for the tone then quickly stick the receiver in the rubber cups and hope the connection was successful. A running 'joke' was to walk by and bump the phone out of the acoustic coupling, closing the connection and pissing off the user who just lost their process/place/progress and might not be able to log in again (due to resource/time sharing constraints).

That's how I first learned BASIC; the true geek of the club had assembled printed manuals, and I plugged away learning exotic incantations like GOSUB. To be honest, the main activity on the Decwriter was playing Star Trek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)).

I miss those days.

I'm impressed - but not necessarily surprised - by the amount of inline guidance that the system gave. These systems must have been cumbersome to wrap one's head around, more so when there was little precedent for using them. The designers, who likely were quite technical for their time, took those extra steps to understand the frames of reference of the users, and explain the system from that frame.

Contrast to today, where user interfaces have largely lost the discoverability principle, and help is often asking someone else who's ridden the wave to where we are today.

> With the search entered, the user chose to look at articles in reverse order for some reason

If yuo had a terminal that did not paginate, this would mean that assuming normal order was best→worst for the search results you didn't lose the best information from is scrolling.

I can almost smell the static burn of the teletype paper, and that weird feeling of chemicals under your nails if you scratched it.

What? The paper on a teletype terminal was ... paper. No weird chremicals or static. A teletype was basically an impact printer (plus maybe a tape punch) with a keyboard and a serial interface. I've used not a few of them.

These are from Silent 700 thermal teletypes, so they're thermal-coated paper, not regular plain paper.

OK - there were a lot of weird printers around way back when. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Printer and we had something similar from IBM (though much more sophisticated) connected to one of our IBM 4381s, which few people knew how to use (except me) or why you would want to (including me).

The Silent 700 paper is the same stuff as thermal receipt printers we're all familiar with nowadays - I use thermal fax paper in mine. I understand that in the old days the paper was nastier than what we have now, though. Plus most workplaces probably bought the cheapest grade they possibly could, and I don't think they even _make_ thermal paper that cheap anymore.

For some reason, I felt compelled to google the subject of the news article regarding the murder of Dallas Morning News photographer, Larry Provart, age 29. It appears that his murder remains unsolved to this day.

"Frederick Terence Baker. Baker was the man accused of the parking lot murder of photographer Larry Provart. On Halloween, in a series of incredible 'clerical errors,' Baker was released from jail and walked out scot-free – the most colossal legal blunder of the year. As of this writing, he has not been found."

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1980/janua...

He appealed his conviction in 1999 (https://www.anylaw.com/case/baker-v-state/court-of-appeals-o...), so must subsequently have been caught.

Thanks for the info.

The cost for a computer, the gear you needed to get "online," and the cost to do so is insane. It's crazy how we're buying $1K phones every year, and have Apple Studio computers or whatever, but this is NOTHING compared to what was spent before!

I'm not old enough to know - how much did it cost in say, 1980 vs 1990?

As one example, an Apple 2e in 1977 cost $1300 for a basic configuration that did NOT include a modem to get online. In 2022 dollars, that’s $6086. Modems added probably another $300 (just a guess) which is $1404 in 2022.

So you’re looking at $7500 (in 2022 dollars) to get online in 1977. And that does NOT include long distance telephone charges, if you needed to connect to computer outside your immediate region.

Maybe now you can see why being online was an elite subculture in the late 70s and 80s. It was later “discovered” by the rest of the world when prices dropped.

That’s not true at all though. By 1985 any kid with a Commodore 64 and a modem could run their own Blue Board BBS for the price of a monthly dedicated phone line. Total cost just a few hundred dollars and with free local calling very inexpensive.

But that's assuming one-at-a-time connections, no? A true BBS would allow multiple connections. Plus, OP's timeframe was 1980, yours is 1985. A couple years back then meant major differences in capabilities, costs, offerings. Not like now, where your iPhone from 2016 is only a little less capable than now.

> Plus, OP's timeframe was 1980. A couple years back then

1977 vs 1985 was an enormous difference in personal computing.

Well yes, but also no. The smaller single line BBSs were great and you could get on them...frequently the multi line ones had a subscription or were constantly busy. As a teenager, I couldn't afford that...but I could afford to run a BBS from 6pm to 9am from my dormroom.

Rumor had it the really BIG bbs's on the coasts had the COOLEST STUFF. But I couldn't afford to call California or New York back then.

Most BBSes were single line systems. I ran a BBS throughout most of the 90's. Very very few local systems had more than 1 line.

The rest of the world "discovered" it when Lee invented the WWW.

I do not agree. The WWW was available in 1994 or so. The percent of population online in 1994 and 1995 vs 10 years later in 2004/2005 later was enormous. It was AOL that really popularized “online”, at least in the US, between those years.

My first pc with 2 yes 2 720kb floppy drives, a apricot, semi portable was around 4.900 dollar.

Who's actually buying $1k phones every year?

In the 80s my dad worked in 'Data Processing'. I can remember taking the pickup truck down to his office on a Saturday a few times per year to recycle a truck load of continuous tractor feed paper. We recycled tons and tons of paper over the years.

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