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

Caged said:
Had to use IPX networking to get old versions of Half-Life talking IIRC
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Played a lot of doom as well in those days.
What an awakening that game was, excellent gameplay, graphics and then you had 4 player matches and modding - and it was only what? 94ish... what a time to be alive.
 
Caged said:
Had to use IPX networking to get old versions of Half-Life talking IIRC
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Ooof I remember the fun and games at LAN parties trying to get IPX working combined with the fun and games of trying to setup a LAN using 10BASE2 (BNC) and messing about with terminators and people accidentally killing the network, etc.
 
billysielu said:
Yeah I was in Hull, so it was Karoo. Things work a little differently there.
https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/guides/broadband/hull-broadband
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Went to Uni in Hull, and after stepping out of Halls into student housing, we hit a brick wall in that no normally available router would work with Karoo broadband. We ended up simply passing around the ADSL modem between us in our shared house.

Rroff said:
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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Incredible. If I remember right getting a ping of 300-350 ms I considered good. I screenshotted my lowest seen ping ever which was about 260 for a brief moment. I remember learning that if you're firing bullets at your target rather than five yards either side of them, you're doing it wrong. At all times you must be shooting into the future. Somehow I got pretty good at doing that.

Then I got ISDN and was just like 'so this is like the regular offline mode then' and started aiming at targets directly rather than the space my advanced-teen-brain-algorithms predicted they might soon occupy in half a second :D
 
My first was Global Internet. I could technically say Orange as I bought a serial cable for my banana phone back in 98 for some 9.6k goodness.

I remember using Demon, Freeserve and Madasafish too.
 
My first modem was an internal job - 28800 I think it was. It’s purchase happily coincided with the launch of a free ISP called X-Stream (I think it was) who funded themselves through ads that automatically launched a browser window when you logged in. Which crashed constantly but left the connection running just fine.
 
The parents weren’t keen on subscription fees so I used Wireplay until Freeserve showed up. When NTL World launched (£15 a month or something for unlimited 0800 access), I put together a decent argument for a monthly sub and a second phone line. NTL was a solid ISP and I stuck with them until ADSL became available in August 2001 - Nildram 512kbps for £50 a month - but got a bollocking for forgetting to cancel the NTL sub and line for three months.

Now on Hyperoptic’s 1Gbps for £45. The speed is good, but the ultra low pings and permanent connection are what really set it apart from the old days for me. The internet just works every time.
 
My dad had the phone barred so I had to use unmetered 0800 isps.

Bigbluesky, madasafish and callnet0800, AOL as well somewhere in there.
 
AOL
Compuserve
Tesco
Freeserve Dial up and eventually ADSL.

i switched around those 4 before settling on Freeserve. After that i been a bit too loyal to ISP's Only had 2.

Eclipse ADSL around 2002
Aquiss ADSL then FTTC. (Since 9th November 2006 at 19:06:47 Aquiss actually replied to my tweet asking them lol)
 
uvarvu said:
My first was Global Internet. I could technically say Orange as I bought a serial cable for my banana phone back in 98 for some 9.6k goodness.

I remember using Demon, Freeserve and Madasafish too.
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Pretty similar to me. Started out with global internet on a Hayes accura 336. Think we moved to madasafish briefly before running on freeserve with a 56k Hayes modem through the change to wanadoo until finally moving to adsl around 2004. (With metronet, who eventually became plusnet)
 
"Welcome to AOL" - 56K. It took 5 hours to download I think it was AOL 9 client, I was so excited lol.
 
Localish ISP who didn't have a "local from anywhere" number and I wasn't actually paying local rate phone calls myself - Dungeon Internet.
Went through a few and actually ended up at AOL - despite being "AOL" they were one of the few who offered those free connections so long as you relogged every couple of hours.
 
The first modem in our house was an early one which my dad used to dial into the IBM mainframe systems.

It was a text based setup and the cursor would scan across a line at a time updating like the old footie scores vidi printer on the TV. 2400 baud or something connected by a real serial port !

I remember dialling BBS servers before the internet too.

Atdt 0800.....
 
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