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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.

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

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.

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.