Do you remember your first dial-up/local ISP?

Gimpymoo

Gimpymoo

Gimpymoo

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Remember when your ISP was a local company seemingly ran by one guy named Dave on the helpdesk who did tech, billing and maybe cleaned the Armitage Shanks before going home.

Thinking back, maybe it was better as you had more choice and even on the same phone line, your choice of ISP DID have an impact on how fast your internet connection / ping was.

ISP's are just these massive multinationals now, and with Fibre, for the most part, the name of the company on the bill is the only thing that changes, not as much fun :(
 
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I can't remember who it was, but I do remember putting £1 an hour into a pot ready for the phone bill :)
 
BT, but my Dad worked for BT, so there was some sort of discount going on. Unfortunately I was made to pay for the phone bill I was wracking up online as a kid. Seem to remember that being over £100 per quarter, which was horrifying to me but I paid it somehow and kept going online. Of course Half Life deathmatch / CS and exploring the internet was just too alluring.

Later we got ISDN, and by this point my family had ceded all control of the internet / ISP choice to me at like 15 . I seem to remember scouring the internet and settling on an ISP called IG internet or similar. The big selling point was an 0800 dial up number and full 128 KB dual channel ISDN access. Then they dropped it to single channel 64 kb access, but there was some program I used to 'duplex' two dial in 64k lines as one effective 128k line. Can't remember the name, but remember the taskbar icon. Eventually they cracked down on that as well, then they went out of business...by which time I was off to university and a T3 connection, albeit behind a restrictive proxy :(
 
Ahh yes university proxys and firewalls... the bane of our life.. i mean from the point of view of folk moaning about them.
But if you see what folk actually want to get up to on your network you would also want to have the dam thing locked down as much as possible.
 
My first ISP was called Direct Connection. Because we had a NTL phone line, the calls to the ISP were free after 6pm. I remember a demo of Dark Forces which was about 20meg taking an hour to download :O :)
 
First was with BT, though we went with another ISP which I can't remember the name of for awhile for awhile before going back to BT when they did unlimited packages.

I remember my parents thought I was made spending the amount per month I was to go online!

One of the nice things about BT they ran some game servers, sadly not hugely populated, close to their network which could get what was for dial-up decent pings (80-125ms) instead of the more normal 150-300ms.
 
sideways14a said:
Ahh yes university proxys and firewalls... the bane of our life.. i mean from the point of view of folk moaning about them.
But if you see what folk actually want to get up to on your network you would also want to have the dam thing locked down as much as possible.
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I remember it being a big thing we couldn't access Steam / Valve authentication or whatever it was called, and therefore couldn't play Half Life 2! Also remember just about getting MSN messenger working, and getting sent files over MSN at speeds more like 56k dial up speeds despite it being a T3 due to the firewall/proxy.

Rroff said:
First was with BT, though we went with another ISP which I can't remember the name of for awhile for awhile before going back to BT when they did unlimited packages.

I remember my parents thought I was made spending the amount per month I was to go online!

One of the nice things about BT they ran some game servers, sadly not hugely populated, close to their network which could get what was for dial-up decent pings (80-125ms) instead of the more normal 150-300ms.
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Do you mean Wireplay? I remember being green with envy that Wireplay had this whole ecosystem where 56kers got 220 ms ping for £x per month plus dial up costs. I never could stretch that far so enjoyed my 350-450ms ping on 56k. (I realised in retrospect Wireplay wouldn't have helped due to our distance from the telephone exchange on 56k being the main issue with our connection)
 
I think we rattled through various dial up providers (primarily BT Internet) including hammering ic24's 0800 weekend number before settling on Pipex for DSL back in 2001. Then went to university and had 10Mbps straight into the room.
 
Vexr said:
Do you mean Wireplay? I remember being green with envy that Wireplay had this whole ecosystem where 56kers got 220 ms ping for £x per month plus dial up costs. I never could stretch that far so enjoyed my 350-450ms ping on 56k. (I realised in retrospect Wireplay wouldn't have helped due to our distance from the telephone exchange on 56k being the main issue with our connection)
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This pre-dated Wireplay (or at least existed separately) but very similar in that you had to dial in specifically and the servers weren't accessible from the wider internet.

Real genuine 82ms latency on 56K dial-up:

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I used to play Quake 1/2 on there quite a bit around 95/96 or so with sub 150ms latency - made it painful going out onto the wider internet to play online where 250ms was good going.

EDIT: My memory is a bit fuzzy but I think it might have been what became Wireplay but I knew it as something else originally.
 
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Used to setup internet cafe's back in 97-99 using ISDN (long before networked IP across a broadband connection).
I did 3 or 4 iirc, with 10 spaces through to 20 odd in some installed all with seperate ISDN modems lol.

Ahh those were the days.
 
Had my own line put into my bedroom and used Madasafish I think, think it might have been Compuserve at some point too.

Thank god for 1p a minute coming in, those £300 a quarter phone bills were getting a bit much.
 
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