90's internet vs modern internet

Ah slightly different from the blue boxing ideas I thought you were on about then.

I remember X-Stream well. I started out on Pipex Dial Plus which my company had (account name dial.pipex.co.uk/~gco70 I seem to remember) then when SurfTime came along I got that via Freeserve though bypassing their malware CD. Thats when the boom hit, Virgin.net etc etc Tesco and ASDA had their own ISPs or rebranded crap.

Then Freenetname hit with FREE .co.uk domains, no catch ... until the following year when the names were locked to them and if you wanted to renew or move £££!

Fond memories of my Diamond Supra Express internal ISA modem; not one of those crappy Winmodems either - full v90 56k baby!
 
My recollection of 90s internet, you would frequently see error 404's, which is a rare occurrence nowadays. Or perhaps a reflection on the fact I visit fewer sites now so less likely to find missing pages.

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But the idea of exploring and learning was the essence of the internet at the beginning, now it's slightly mundane even though it's 100x more practical.
 
Obviously the speed is massive advantage these days, but in many ways Internet got dumber compared to 90ies. In many cases websites got less informative, more CMS-ish, samey and spammy. Web browsers are better, but search engines are poorer. People don't just type informative content and post pages anymore, you have to design the whole site to suit search engine, instead of search engine actually searching your pages for proper content. In many ways the **** looking geocities pages with wall of text that actually was exactly on the subject and right to the point was better than visiting 20 wordpress/drupal/joomla templates with little square of repetitive syndicated content drivel serving as bait for two side panels of adverts and adsenses.

I liked IRC days, I liked instant messenger days, but I don't like social media. I don't like this aol derrived demand for thumbing up every little petty thing, product and service. I don't like how I'm pestered to follow, join, merge, add as friend and circle on every step. I hate how you have to keep guard at all times and make sure another login, click, change of contacts on your phone, addition to your schedule or installation of an app doesn't end up with software or provider automatically spamming people with "/full credit card name/ added you to his circle and invited you to join gobledeetwitbookplus". I don't want apps and devices to announce to the entire world how I "shared" something when I simply message, post or email things, I don't want them to add "posted from my iBlackdroid" or auto tag my messenger status with "logged in via IM+bot on Pear Fruitberry" like it was some gadget flashing contest.

But then again, I am getting older. I spent most of my life building this digital world with others and thought I understood it in depth, but I probably just reached the point where I start turning into my own father. From now on I will probably become more and more perplexed by why things work in such a weird and lame way these days and puzzled by why people do what they do on trivial websites. In few years I will lose my way around remote control for the next generation full eitch dee blue raymond doovd thing and be forced to study pictorial manuals in far eastern languages for hours in order to program my satellite TV channels. ;)
 
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I preferred it back then, online gaming was more fun due there being less childish idiots and the lack of things like facebook meant people actually socialised properly rather than trolling facebook when bored.
 
HangTime said:
0800 isps are what they sound like, providers that used a freecall (typically 0800 prefix) number so you wouldn't pay by the minute.

Basically in the late 90s before all the mainstream flat rate services took off (starting with BT free weekends) there were some dodgy BT Internet accounts floating around, then a few providers started offering legit services but of course there would be hacked passwords etc doing the rounds. Also one quickly discovered that certain IP ranges on the BT free weekend often didn't cut you off after 2hrs like they were supposed to - if your hostname was of the format "host62-x-x-x.btinternet.com" you had a good chance of not getting booted (quite sad I can remember this I suppose!). So at 10mins to midnight on Sunday you'd redial as many times as required to get on that host. Then there would be the anxious wait to 01:50 to see if you'd stay online before calling it a night, downloads chugging away. Slowly throughout the monday people would drop off, but you'd get the odd lucky sod staying online for days. Other interesting vagaries of the system included the fact that despite BT prohibiting the use of dual-channel ISDN on the free weekend service, foolishly they'd only blocked multilink on the published ISDN number. If you dialled the v90/k56 modem number, it would still work on ISDN, and multilink was permitted!

There were even some really crazy ass ideas being introduced, like this company X-stream released a freecall isp using some custom software to display adverts and limit how many dial attempts you could use (it was massively oversubscribed). But it was trivial to just take the number out and manually create your own dialup connection using some utility to spam redial. Needless to say they didn't last very long, nor did ISPs like ezsurf and RedHotAnt that offered LIFETIME (or at least a year) unlimited access for a flat fee of say £25-£50. Essentially my interpretation is there was a MASSIVE flaw in market research they did, they looked at what the average amount of time people spent online was, it was maybe 5hrs per week. But the reason it was only 5hrs per week was because people had to pay by the minute! If you offered a free service, you'd instantly attract all the heavy users. Bear in mind this was dialup days i.e. a single channel ISDN could download about 500MB/day. So obviously you'd leave it downloading 24/7 to pull down stuff, it wasn't like today where people have connections capable of pulling down anything they want in under an hour.

Another 'scam' some people I knew in London pulled was there was this telco that didn't charge for local calls up to 10mins in length. So they'd tracked down an ISP (Nildram) that has a published localrate number and also offered static IP. Then one of the guys wrote a program to automatically redial the ISDN after 09:50 or so. Because ISDN reconnects so fast, and because they had static IPs, this basically meant that they could stay 'permanently' connected to 128k ISDN save for a couple of seconds of downtime every 10mins. They wouldn't even timeout from IRC etc because they'd come back online with the same IP before any timeout period.
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LOL I remember doing that on Sundays.

Another scam was war dialing through 0800 (you'd find BT numbers that way) for meridian PBXs, then you just press 9 and it gives you a line out, then you dialed an ISP number and it was free internet. There was a newsgroup called alt.ph.uk that was quite fun back then.

You could also get free mobile calls with those chipped BT mobiles, and free Telewest cable with a cable cube before everything was digital. There was a huge black market for all this stuff back then.

Then when Telewest started doing cable internet you could setup your own TFTP server with a modified config file and set your own speed caps. It would max out at about 6 mbit down, 1mbit up... while everyone else had 0.5mbit down. Then about a year later lol they sent out threatening letters telling people to stop it.

There was some extremely more shady stuff as well that I wont go in to.
 
I think the saddest way ever of getting free internet was for some reason tons of 0800 numbers would randomly connect to American numbers. Sometimes they would connect to people's houses even. A lot of them went to the operator at random crappy American hotels for some reason. What you could do is socially engineer out of them where the hotel was, then look up a local POP number to there. Then you called and say yeah I just need to make a local call can tyou connect me please? And told them the number and you could get free internet at about 2400bps :D via an 0800 connected to some random motel in Anaheim :confused: Then you could do all sorts of shady business because it's prettyy much impossible to trace it, especially if you went through another PBX first.
 
The old days of playing quake2 on 56k dial up, lucky if i had a sub 100 ping and envying the isdn guys with their minus 20's......shouting "lag" if i was on a bad run lol
The web seemed so much more friendlier then, it also seemed like it was ours, our thing that only we knew about..........now everyone has it and it's lost its mystique somewhat :(

Didn't like the first "internet" phone bill.......£600+ !!!!! The missus blew her top lol
 
Trying to play my first ever competitive FPS games - Rogue Spear and Ghost Recon, of all things - on a 56k dial-up connection in the less-telecommunicationally-favoured rural shires... being about 12 years old and having no real understanding of Internet technology (it was my first ever desktop PC, bang-on in 1999/2000). Heard some of the guys in the game lobby discussing 'DSL' and how it was the 'better' Internet. Whenever I was accused of lagging or warping out in a competitive match I'd just say in chat (with total confidence and self-assurance): "No, I'm on a DSL". I didn't even know what DSL was then. When questioned about my high-ping I'd just reply "it's through a switch exchange", thinking that a phone exchange was something people could have installed in their homes. Ah, fantastic. Got away with it as well and reached the illustrious competitive heights, etc.etc...

I do agree that the Internet seemed smaller and friendlier, then. I blame social media and things like this, to a certain extent. Back then it was quite a nerdy and abstruse thing to get into, and game communities and people with things in common online flocked together to share an interest and passion. Games were based around IRC chat lobbies or early rudimentary forums/newsgroups, and everyone knew one another-- insular, but positively so. Nowadays there's just so many people, and everyone has blurred the lines between online life and real socialising. It's all a bit mundane now.
 
Ghost Recon was quite under-rated. I really enjoyed it especially the desert expansions.

Viet Cong was another under-rated one. Dont know why it wasn't more popular.
 
Yes I remember back in 1996 or so 56k dial up.

getting those AOL free hour, 2 hour etc introductory offers.

All there was back then was Chat rooms etc, was fun.

Mind you, when I got into counter strike and had to start downloading updates for it, it would take a day or so just to get the updates.

Then when playing on line (56k) that was choppy at times, good old lag.

But I prefer it now.

Miss AOL chat rooms for what they were back then and Paltalk.
 
56k then moving to ISDN getting up an hour before school to get some TFC in. ahh the days!
And as mentioned geocities/Lycos/ICQ

Still use MirC :P
 
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