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There were a handful in my town, and I regularly dialed in to 3 or 4 (my memory is vague). It was mostly based on the games they had more than anything else, although one with collaborative stories was pretty fun, at least after my friend and my brother and I took over a few stories and exercised questionable creative control.
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Mar 26, 2022 08:17
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| # ? May 25, 2024 05:11 |
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I kept up with a few. One had nes roms, one had good pc games, one had mountains of hentai, I was level 12 in LORD on all of them
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Mar 26, 2022 13:28
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The only local board I remember really wasn’t very good and we were young, so naturally we spent most of the time on there just making fun of the sysop.
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Mar 26, 2022 14:49
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I wish I was around for BBS', they sound pretty neat. My first internet experience was AOL.
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Mar 26, 2022 19:20
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Cojawfee posted:I wish I was around for BBS', they sound pretty neat. My first internet experience was AOL. Mine was with Prodigy.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:14
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Imagine if the only part of the internet you could access was a few hundred megabytes, entirely hosted on one computer in your hometown, and that one computer was owned by a guy you would cross the street to avoid if you ever saw him And it was delivered to you at a blistering fast 4.8 kbps
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Mar 26, 2022 20:18
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And it had one line, so if someone else was on it downloading some huge file like… 2mb, well you’re just gonna be sitting there retrying for 30 minutes.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:26
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I was a child without money so I just ordered free AOL CDs and canceled each before the trial was up. To stock up on trial codes, I once filled out the free CD order form repeatedly by hand and a few days later the postal worker stopped and knocked on our door to ask if we had been expecting a stack of tens of AOL CDs. AOL apparently didn't check for duplicate submissions. They started at 10 hour trials and just went up from there (20 hours, 50 hours, eventually "1000 hours"), but you also had to cancel within a month regardless of the advertised hours. I don't think I ever actually paid AOL any money and after about a year of this we instead set up an account with a local dialup ISP.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:30
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I ran up a £300 phone bill to compuserve within 2 months of getting my first modem and my parents were mad as gently caress. The phone company agreed to put us into a trial scheme for their first monthly unlimited dial-up package when they called to try and query the bill, and I used birthday and Christmas money that year to pay to have a second phone line put in so I could internet all I wanted.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:37
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Progressive JPEG posted:I was a child without money so I just ordered free AOL CDs and canceled each before the trial was up. To stock up on trial codes, I once filled out the free CD order form repeatedly by hand and a few days later the postal worker stopped and knocked on our door to ask if we had been expecting a stack of tens of AOL CDs. AOL apparently didn't check for duplicate submissions. If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that the trial keys were all the same. At least they were by the time they were 1000 hours.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:54
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I lived in rural Ohio so dialing into a BBS meant doing it on the weekend when long distance rates were the cheapest and hoping mom didn't pick up the phone. I sent a letter to Compuserve asking if they'd consider an access number in our county seat which was the only other town that wasn't long distance. They replied back that I could use a 1-800 WATS line for something like $6/hr. Needless to say, that was not gonna happen.
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Mar 26, 2022 21:01
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Progressive JPEG posted:I was a child without money so I just ordered free AOL CDs and canceled each before the trial was up. To stock up on trial codes, I once filled out the free CD order form repeatedly by hand and a few days later the postal worker stopped and knocked on our door to ask if we had been expecting a stack of tens of AOL CDs. AOL apparently didn't check for duplicate submissions.  I forgot all about buying internet time, poo poo was wild.
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Mar 26, 2022 21:05
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LifeSunDeath posted:
Is this the nomoreaolcds.com guy?
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Mar 26, 2022 21:30
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LifeSunDeath posted:I forgot all about buying internet time, poo poo was wild. I use prepaid 4G at home (they won't offer a land-line anymore), because it's 3-10€ cheaper. There's no downside. Actually there's an upside: I can use it in a phone in an emergency because the SIM came with 5€ worth of call time. A 4G subscription doesn't.
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Mar 26, 2022 21:41
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How much of those CDs did the data for AOL even take up? I don't see how a client for dialing up the internet could be anywhere near 700 megs back then.
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Mar 26, 2022 21:45
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In the gap between BBSs and the Internet I kind of dropped out of tech, so when I got my own house and computer I used AOL for a while. I refreshed and improved my tech skills pretty rapidly, and discovered that my local NetZero numbers would give me a better connection than my paid AOL connection, so I dropped AOL (I had stopped using their proprietary poo poo anyway and just keeping the connection alive while I used a regular browser) and relied on NetZero for a while. Then I started working at the university and had access to their dial-up number, and used that for a while. Finally I got DSL, and joined the broadband master race at 256k/256k and it was glorious. I pwned so many people in Tribes after that. 
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Mar 26, 2022 22:01
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History Comes Inside! posted:I ran up a £300 phone bill to compuserve within 2 months of getting my first modem and my parents were mad as gently caress. After I ran up a massive phone bill we changed isp to one called IC24. The gimmick of that was it was completely free dialup, you called an 0800 number. The catch? It kicked you off after one hour, but they said you were welcome to re-connect as many times as you want. It usually took a few attempts to get a connection, but it always worked. So how did they make money? Well, it was the peak of the dot com bubble, so I assume they simply did not.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:07
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Cojawfee posted:How much of those CDs did the data for AOL even take up? I don't see how a client for dialing up the internet could be anywhere near 700 megs back then. AOL originally sent out a single 3.5" disk for their "Free X Hours!" (probably 5 to 15) promotions. Getting free, reusable 3.5" disks much cooler than free coasters. I don't recall the client changing that much over the practical lifetime of AOL. Even assuming the move to CDs made them compress the client less, I'd be amazed if it used more than 15 megabytes. They could have put filler in the form of documents and music on the disc, but I don't recall anything. Remember, hard drives back then were small, too. You couldn't count on someone keeping the disc around, and asking them to put it back in after installing was probably a bridge to far.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:10
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Who was it that said they were going to go to 0800 first in the UK, wasn’t it a weird combination of Dixons and Netscape? Which then might not have even happened, but then the competition all adjusted anyway so I’m grateful for them as I could then tie up my parents phone lines for 12 hours a night without worry. Curse that auto kickoff though, but bless GetRight.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:11
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EL BROMANCE posted:Who was it that said they were going to go to 0800 first in the UK, wasn’t it a weird combination of Dixons and Netscape? As Freeserve.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:19
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Ah I was with freeserve for a good amount of time, so the disappearing thing wasn’t them and I’m mixing two companies. The wiki page just says they were ‘one of the first’ to go toll free alas. Maybe the Netscape part was accurate and it was just them by themselves who planned to do it.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:28
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Freeserve were loving terrible in every experience I ever had trying to connect to them. Just a million attempts where it would answer and claim to be connected but lol no you’re not, it’s how I first learned to tell whether or not I should hang it up and redial a connection just by the sounds towards the end of the handshake.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:30
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As I recall, here in the US both Juno and NetZero had free dial-up supported by ads in their proprietary browsers. Which you could minimize and just use a regular browser instead of. I think they might have needed keep-alive programs like AOL in order to keep connections up and running, but my memory is vague on that. I remember figuring out which numbers had the best connections, trying to get as close to 56k as I could, which of course never actually got to 56k. A consistent 40k+ was the usual target, if I recall correctly.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:40
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One of my friends shotgunned four NetZero modems together back in the day. It worked exactly as well as you'd expect. flavor.flv posted:Imagine if the only part of the internet you could access was a few hundred megabytes, entirely hosted on one computer in your hometown, and that one computer was owned by a guy you would cross the street to avoid if you ever saw him  The local BBS numbers were word-of-mouth amongst my friends in high school so most of us never physically knew who ran them. I distinctly remember running into the owner of one when I was applying for a job at the local mom-and-pop computer shop....  I did use his BBS to download System Shock on a 2400 baud modem though, so 
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Mar 26, 2022 22:44
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CaptainSarcastic posted:As I recall, here in the US both Juno and NetZero had free dial-up supported by ads in their proprietary browsers. Which you could minimize and just use a regular browser instead of. I think they might have needed keep-alive programs like AOL in order to keep connections up and running, but my memory is vague on that. I remember figuring out which numbers had the best connections, trying to get as close to 56k as I could, which of course never actually got to 56k. A consistent 40k+ was the usual target, if I recall correctly. I had a program that decoded your NetZero user name and password so that you could use standard Windows dial up networking instead of their adware dialup app to connect, or connect with something like your Dreamcast or ps2.
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Mar 27, 2022 01:26
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I lived so far out in the sticks that we didn't have a local AOL, Prodigy or Compuserve number. Before then, we briefly had eWorld. Until Dad realized there were long distance charges. Hence why we never had any national companies for dial-up internet. Didn't stop us from always receiving any of those companies' disks in the mail, though.
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Mar 27, 2022 02:07
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Thanks Powered Descent for your first reply, pointing out the thing I had not considered, that in an area with actual choices of BBSs to call that you would actually have to narrow your selection down before even getting involved. I imagine I never would have called some of the duller boards in my own hometown (looking at you, Prairie BBS, and the hilariously ostentatious in hindsight "Midwest Online") if there had been a lot more kid-cool-named like Constant Enigma, Castle Roogna, or Adventurer's Corner. Also the turn in the discussion on this page now has me wondering if anyone here was both oldschool and wealthy enough to have played games like the Island of Kesmai when it cost like $8/hour or whatever insane rate the MMORPGs of the late 1980s charged. The America Online version of Neverwinter Nights probably was worth that for at least a while for the novelty though I imagine
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Mar 27, 2022 06:15
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I'd totally dial into Prairie BBS
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Mar 27, 2022 06:19
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QMODEM TELEGARD RENEGADE BBS Flood of nostalgic memories just on the names of those software alone. Detroit suburb (Macomb county) BBSer here Circa 1990-93? Ran a few myself over the years but pretty much just to play with the software, never caught on with anyone.
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Mar 27, 2022 06:20
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Pham Nuwen posted:I'd totally dial into Prairie BBS
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Mar 27, 2022 06:29
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It's a common cliche of stories about people saying the internet is a fad and BBS would never die, but when I started using the internet I think around 1996, it did feel in many ways inferior to BBSes. The early web pages were super slow to download and they looked like poo poo, even the professional pages. And the text based services like USENET felt inferior to BBSes because BBSes had super fancy color ANSI menus and well developed systems. And USENET was just ugly text. The thing that really got me excited about the internet was IRC. I continued to use IRC regularly until about 2010 and through the years made many good friends and even girlfriends through it.
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Mar 27, 2022 07:58
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Dr. Quarex posted:It DID have some "make a rock band and manage their career" door game I never saw anywhere else that was incredibly dorky but still fun enough to bring me back a few times. Stealth solid choice I think I remember that game. And a similar one where you cast and produced a movie and had to promote it.
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Mar 27, 2022 08:02
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Horace posted:After I ran up a massive phone bill we changed isp to one called IC24. The gimmick of that was it was completely free dialup, you called an 0800 number. The catch? It kicked you off after one hour, but they said you were welcome to re-connect as many times as you want. It usually took a few attempts to get a connection, but it always worked. I remember IC24. The install CD set up a standard dialup connection with an 0845 number you had to pay for. You could only get the free connection by manually changing the phone number to the 0800 number buried in the small print. I found this out the hard way when my parents got a £140 bill one month. Also the 0800 number was constantly busy. I think I managed to connect to it once at like 3am.
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Mar 27, 2022 11:42
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I was in a fortunate (???) position as a kid because my dad was a tech geek on the side and used BBS boards from his Atari ST back in the early '90s, and we had an internet connection as early as '94 (I was born in '88). We were definitely an outlier and I remember being the only kid in my class to know what the internet was. That said we were pretty late to abandon dial-up, I remember using an old 28.8kbps modem on my hand-me-down Pentium II until like 2001/2002? It's kind of weird looking back and realizing that I grew up alongside the internet. I really miss the way browsing used to feel before tabs sometimes. The internet experience used to feel more linear in a weird sort of way.
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Mar 27, 2022 12:36
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This AOL CD chat is interesting. My household was an early, mainstream adopter, if that makes sense, in so far as we were the first people I knew online and beat the AOL marketing avalanche by a few months, which felt like a long time at 14. We used breathe.net, which I believe was Toys R Us affiliated in some way? I'm not sure how that happened. Maybe I bought my PC from Toys R Us? Surely not! Anyway, I had to sit with a little dish I'd drop 2p into per minute to pay for my Internet use. I remember playing Quake 2 online and dropping pennies in the jar each time I died.
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Mar 27, 2022 12:48
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History Comes Inside! posted:I ran up a £300 phone bill to compuserve within 2 months of getting my first modem and my parents were mad as gently caress. Did pretty much the same, though it was in my [first] flat, my phone bill went through the roof.
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Mar 27, 2022 14:29
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Mister Kingdom posted:Mine was with Prodigy. My first real internet experience was at 14 in mid 05 when we moved to an apartment complex with a business center with 2 computers. Id get home from school and go right over and gently caress around for a couple hours despite the half hour time limit. My dad didnt want me doing it at home yet because of, presumably, the risk of finding porn. It took me less than a week to do so and a decade and a half to shake that particular specter. He was on dial-up until 2010 and DSL until 2017.
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Mar 27, 2022 15:20
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lobsterminator posted:It's a common cliche of stories about people saying the internet is a fad and BBS would never die, but when I started using the internet I think around 1996, it did feel in many ways inferior to BBSes. Honestly Windows 95/98 was the end of me using BBSs, as once my incompetent friends destroyed my MS-DOS system by trying to make it a Linux-based system for a telnet BBS I did not even know about any Windows-based programs to do similar functionality and was like "welp, guess that is done." And now I suddenly remember I used a couple of web-based BBSs in the late 1990s, which were basically identical to what we now call forums, and my mind is blown to think about this
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Mar 27, 2022 19:25
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For a little while there was a “free” dialup email service but I can’t recall the name. Only email was offered, like AOL super junior.
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Mar 27, 2022 19:27
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Dicty Bojangles posted:For a little while there was a “free” dialup email service but I can’t recall the name. Only email was offered, like AOL super junior. Juno? A buddy of mine's dad had that before they got internet access.
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Mar 27, 2022 20:42
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