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Comment by elliotec | Hacker News Reader

The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/

On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all.

My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s.

In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image.

It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.

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East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).

The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.

After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.

Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.

A high school with a T1 connection was pretty sick! I don't know quite how to translate it into terms younger readers can appreciate.

5 gigabit symmetric right now, if you're American.

The thing is, nobody in the US cares about the network any more; it's been good enough for twenty years. I don't even know how fast mine is. It was very different then. People had modems that pushed 9.6kbps, 14.4kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6kbps, then 56kbps. Each upgrade was substantial because it was the limiting factor -- I remember each one, as you can see -- and obviously way slower than that mythical T1.

> nobody in the US cares about the network any more

Definitely not true if you live in a rural area.

I can personally attest to this, until I moved out to the city, I was significantly kneecapped in terms of what speeds I could have and it had an impact given how many services just implicitly assume you have high bandwidth and more or less lock you out if you don't. And I was one of the "lucky" ones in the sense that I was on a well known national cable provider, heaven forbid you were on telecom DSL or (for the really poor sods out there) V.92 or ISDN.

Is this true? I thought it was closer to 5 megabit.

Skyline High School had a teletype terminal by 1978. I think it connected to the University of Utah, though I am not absolutely certain. But that was a long way below a T1 line...

I recall in the late 70s that my high school also had a teletype terminal and an IBM card reader that connected to a mainframe for the whole school district. As a student I had some awareness that it was unusual. I was also working PT at a Radio Shack at the same time and saw the first arrival of a TRS-80 to our store.

Despite that early exposure to computing technology I went other directions for the next couple decades.

Some Utah school districts still use the k12.ut.us domain in places, for school and grade management: https://skystu.jordan.k12.ut.us/

1994 was way way after dialup Internet access was mainstream (both Yahoo and Amazon were founded that year). Any first access in the state would be sometime in the 80s. By 1993 there were already national level dialup ISPs.

> that was about as long [15 minutes] as it took to load one webpage with one image.

Very hyperbolic. A simple webpage with text would load in seconds on a 28.8k modem. A single image would usually be a 10s of kB in those days, so maybe some seconds, not even a minute.

This is not correct for access open to the general public. The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was founded in 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access through the University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown, the founder, had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had quite good internet connectivity). But most people did not if they weren't associated with a university.

(I helped create the third public ISP in Utah (ArosNet), in 1995).

V34 (28.8k) was only ratified in 1994, and many ISPs were still at 14.4 at that time. Many customers still used much slower modems - 9600 remained quite common.

The commercial Internet really only started taking off in 1993. Not by coincidence, that was the same year NCSA Mosaic was released.

Wow, Utah really lagged on getting an ISP, huh?

From a UK perspective: my family got dual up in ‘94, there were lots of ISP options & it was basically impossible to buy anything slower than 28.8k new (at retail anyhow, I’m sure you could special order) as no-where stocked them. 28.8 took over fast.

I think the UK had lots pf ISPs at the time because without a local number to call it was VERY expensive rather than just kinda expensive. But that’s just a guess.

Population density helps a lot with internet access. Distance to COs is smaller, easier to wire, shorter backhaul, etc. The salt lake city metro area had reasonable density but, particularly 30 years ago, it wasn't like .. most places in the UK or Europe.

Commercial ISP. People had dialup internet access before there were commercial ISPs.

Yes, I’m aware. That’s what I was talking about

I was still fighting local telcos in Canada in 2003 to get filters removed so I could go above 9600 baud.

I moved to Canada in 2002 and my 56k modem worked just fine and I'm pretty sure (though I might be misremembering) cable and ADSL were already around (I think people were amused that I was still using dialup). I'm sure some other parts were behind.

I think I had Internet access around 1984 or so, lived near a university (this was not in the US so must have been some early international connection). Before that we had BITNET (IBM's network) and uucp. My first networking from home experience was with a 300bps modem to an IBM mainframe using a terminal program I wrote myself on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It was a pretty crappy half-duplex but pretty exciting as a kid.

A trip down memory lane...

This was St. Josephs Island. As soon as we had a little WiFi based ISP up and running suddenly broadband was available. Wonder why...

> This is not correct for access open to the general public. The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was founded in 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access through the University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown, the founder, had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had quite good internet connectivity).

> The commercial Internet really only started taking off in 1993.

1993 is before 1994.

I am very much scratching my head by how this contradicts anything I stated in a way that makes it not correct.

If a commercial ISP existed in 1993, then by 1994 plenty of regular people would have been getting internet access - without any special affiliation other than a credit card - ie mainstream. (Per your own comment “many had internet access before that”) - those affiliated were among the first to have internet access is a pretty reasonable interpretation and that was well before 1994 in all of the continental US.

It wasn't "way after" in Utah. Xmission turned on in October 1993. They grew a lot in 1994 but most people in the valley still did not have internet access yet. By 1996 the situation was very different - but 94 was still early in the Utah Internet days. The growth in Internet adoption was so rapid during those 3 years that the difference just between 94 and 95 was quite large.

And yes, many faculty, students, and staff at the U had access. But that was like 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.

Ok not “way” after - really splitting hairs here. Point still stands public commercial dialup internet was available pretty much everywhere. Call them early adopters or whatever - but the internet already had established communities well before 1994.

> 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the interpretation of what “first families”. In the context I read that post it sounded like someone saying they were among literally the first few, not 50k to 100k when anyone with a credit card could order service. First families in my interpretation would be those that probably had access from their parent’s university shell account. This follows with the claim 15 minutes to load a single webpage - but unless you were on a shitty rural phone line running 2400bps it’s not like everyone’s dialup internet access at the time was that limited. Some had to put up with that but the tech in 1994 was not that primitive.

50k had access if they wanted it. Most didn't use it. I'm confused why you don't believe me that internet penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in 1994 - I was there, I ran an internet service provider, and prior to that, I co-ran the largest multi-line BBS in salt lake. I'd been doing dial up for a long time.

You may be assuming that your experience in a different location applies to Utah, but I think that you're really just shifted by a year. The GP almost certainly weren't actually one of the first families in the sense of dozens, but they could well have been first among people they knew in their area. 15 minutes is probably hyperbole.

> I'm confused why you don't believe me that internet penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in 1994

I do believe you. Really have no dispute with any details you’re putting down.

I suppose the distinction I’m making is about the cohort of early adopters that had special (usually U access) from those using commercial ISPs or BBSes. That earliest cohort no matter how small it was a good bit earlier than 1994 and eternal September. I’ll grant my wording inadvertently exaggerating the penetration of availability in 1994, just saying the first households were probably getting dialup some years prior.

For me an EE prof managed get me a shell account in 1990 while in middle school. Even in rust belt US many friends just used AOL into 1994 and uptake of dialup ISPs was still slow, but that 1994 cohort was distinct.

My first dialup was to BBS's in the early 80s using a Novation AppleCat[1] and I think I was using The Source[2] around the same time, which eventually got swallowed by CompuServe[3]. To access The Source you dialed in to Telenet[4] first and then connected from there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

I think my first Internet access was through Prodigy[5]. The Wikipedia says this wouldn't have been till 1994[6], but I remember it being a few years earlier since by 1994 I would have been using AOL.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)#Conve...

My first significant Internet access was at U.F. in 1995. While at U.F. I was also the sole system administrator for a small ISP in Gainesville. Two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston PortMaster with a dozen Hayes modems attached and a T1 for uplink.

My family also piloted something called Viewtron in the early 80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewtron

AT&T marketing video for Viewtron:

https://youtu.be/sgYkpk9nJnE

I would say dial up Internet was far from mainstream in 94, even with was widely available.

I'd argue it wasn't until 96/97 when "everyone" started using it and membership didn't quite peak with services like AOL until 2001.

The internet was still the land of the nerds until the early 2000's

It's difficult to generalize. It definitely depends on your location, and especially population density. Before 1995, it was mostly nerds and early adopters. By 1995, in the north east US, dial up internet had definitely gone mainstream. Local ISPs had ads on the radio. A new one was popping up everyone couple of months. By late 1997, early '98, broadband services (@Home cable modems, DSL) were starting to roll out.

The Netscape IPO, in summer 1995, and also the release of Windows 95, really marks the "mainstream" period. Getting online with Trumpet Winsock and Windows 3.1 was a PITA.

> The internet was still the land of the nerds until the early 2000's

The first dot com boom, sort of the genesis of fortunes that make this site exist was prior to the early 2000s.

The early 2000s was the bust period.

Right, unless the backhaul was massively overcommitted... which was normal at the time because it was really difficult to sufficiently provision backhaul, even a few months in advance. The internet was certainly not fast in 1994.

Anyway, since when does the truth need to get in the way of a good story?

You assume 28.8, good phone lines, and a responsive server. Sometimes it was an old 9600 because it was all you could easily get, noisy lines, and the server on the other end being slow because the picture was popular. Then a page could load for a minute, with pictures and all.

Not 15 minutes though.

Dialup services were available. Most had little to no internet connectivity. The few services dedicated to internet access were not mainstream yet. MS was preparing to deploy MSN 1.0 with no internet because that was just a hippie fad.

I remember having dialup in 1994 through xmission. It was the same year my dad installed Slackware on our basement computer.

There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet.

Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the first places on the planet to have the "Internet".

The Jazz, like Jim Clark, were another transplant from New Orleans.

> Details are .. not retrievable from the dead

You inherited your dad's British humour :)

The U of U still has a large block of public IPs that they use for all their "internal" systems. No need for NAT there!

That was at least 100% true as of around 15 years ago. I know the CS and engineering departments are still using that block. Hard to imagine that it still holds true for WiFi APs, etc and the proliferation of devices.

That's how the internet should have been.

I can only imagine how cool it must be to be raised by early adopters of internet technology.

I can somewhat relate to this story in a couple coincidental points. First is that my father being a relatively early adopter of the PC in his professional life as a civil engineer in the early 80s, while an internet connection was about twenty years in the future for him, and the second one is that I learned electron microscopy on a Jeol microscope from 1994 when I was doing my master's in material science.

And this is my first comment in HN. I hope everyone is doing wonderfully well.

Most of the discussion on this thread is about my timeline of saying we were one of the first families with internet in 1994. First of all, I did try to qualify it with “as I was told” - i was a kid and all I knew was what my dad and the internet told me - but I was writing that comment with haste and on second thought, the timing was certainly more like 1992. Also, I didn’t say that’s when we got it, just when he told me that. As i said before, he had it in the 80s. Just to throw a wrench in the discussion. Also yes, it was hyperbole to say it took 15 min to download an image, but just barely and just for the fun of the story. Love you all and your pedantic asses.

1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families with internet in their house by 1992.

Are you saying that you were made during one of those 15-min waits?

Great story thanks for sharing. We come to HN for this :-)

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