Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour (and it was the cheap service! Prodigy, Compuserve, and especially GEnie were more expensive!). Leaving it connected overnight would get you grounded in a hurry when that AOL bill came in the next month.

It was really no wonder that all of those services basically collapsed once dial up ISPs with flat (and low!) monthly fees started appearing. $10 for unlimited (modem speed) data is a steal in comparison.

View on HN

> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour

Let me guess: are you American?

Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.

They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.

But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.

I am still liamproven@aol.com to this day.

TIL that Brits used America Online.

AOL UK launched in 1996. My account is a journalist's complimentary one from back then.

It was a worldwide service which is why it rebranded as "AOL".

I don't really use it any more, but one of its half a dozen alternate account names is still my mother's primary email address.

I’m sure we fairly quickly (as in fairly quickly after 56k became a thing) had zero call rate ISPs who just charged a small monthly. We used to use FreeUK (eventually taken over by Clara), and had a second line dedicated to it.

Yes, it did come, you're right.

It was about 15 years or so after the BBS boom in the USA, though, which was driven by free local calls.

I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)

I was a teenager on the tail end of dialup, so no hourly fee, but my parents got awfully mad if I tied up our phone line all day playing online games. They’d randomly call home a few times a day to ensure compliance.

Yep I had that too :-)

Good times. I built a wardialler out of one of those science fair 150 in one kits and an Atari st using an rs232 data line to bounce a relay. found plenty, but the fun ended when the 400 quid bill came in. Endless paper rounds.

i've backspaced over trying to be nice but i don't think you a) could've made the dtmf tones, b) matched the impedance, c) modulated the serial signal even if you made a connection

please prove me wrong

They’re describing pulse dialing, not tone dialing. Totally doable using a toggleable serial port pin and some basic electronics.

Yep, playing too much Quake online I hit a record 500 EUR phone bill once (1000 deutsche Mark back then). My parents weren't amused. :D

Accidently dialing an non-local number for AOL ended up getting me banned from the family PC for a month. Long distance charges were expensive. (US)

Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.

I discovered that my phone company had numbers in the same area code that were "medium distance". You dialed them like a local call and they were in the same area code, but they would inflate your phone bill in a hurry. It wasn't easy to figure out if a number would be in that zone either. I had to cancel my first ISP after getting the monster phone bill at the end of the month. Luckily they weren't full up long distance or it would have bankrupted me, also lucky that I only joined the ISP in the middle of the month.

Nope, I don't. We mostly used prepaid internet service and I also had some very strict computer use allowances.

Was the bill forgiven the first time (and the first time only) ? Good for customer relations.

Nah but really the bill wasn't bad enough for that, and honestly I'm not sure that kind of PR move was very common before social media days (total guess). I just remember it because I had to give my parents the difference and as a 12-13 year old that £30 was a lot!

I've been using AOL CD-codes up until the moment where I got my hands on some Compuserve code generator. The only cost which remained was for the local dial up. Good times. I personally thanked a Compuserve representative for their easy access at some fair. Didn't seem like he understood but I still felt better afterwards.

I used NetZero, which was an ad-supported dial-up provider. The only cost was the phone call, which was local, so not very expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com