What getting to the Internet was like in 1993
Posted by EsoTechTrix@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 74 comments
Found the welcome (snail) mail I got from a BBS in '93. I was planning to erase the personal information but the label fell off when I was trying to flatted out the fold. 🤣
Lots of gems here. Some pricing, an lovely explanation of this thing called the 'Internet', some slang to help you out. The email 'rules' are the best. Clearly from a more civilized century.
cazzipropri@reddit
Does anybody else feel that life was better back then? Is it just nostalgia, or there's something more?
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
It was cheaper. That's for sure.
I was looking at what it took to get a PC in the early 90's. Ignoring the fact that you can just find one that is more than usable today, most all min wage is 3 to 4 times what we had and the price of a new computer is a fraction of what it was. Not to mention that internet access is free in a lot of places.
cazzipropri@reddit
Life moved more slowly and was more sustainable...
ksuwildkat@reddit
No it wasn't.
We were literally poisoning our air with lead until 1996.
You could still smoke on airplanes until 2000.
In 1972 New York and Nebraska took the radical step of lowering their DUI cutoff to... 0.15%. Yeah it was higher before. It took until 2000 for the national standard to be lowered to 0.08. In 1982 48% of US traffic deaths were from DUIs. That year we killed 25K Americans in DUI accidents. Last year we killed 12K but there are 110 million more people in the country than in 1982. Almost 50% more people and 50% fewer deaths.
It took until 2010 to ban CFCs that were literally burning a hole in our atmosphere.
Acid rain was so bad in parts of the north east that it would strip the paint off cars and destroy marble.
cazzipropri@reddit
Thanks for that reminder. I like factual data and numbers.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
That said, I miss clove cigarettes in dive coffee shops late into the night.... I've never even smoked. Give me cancer and let me live the life I have. 🤣
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
I just found a floppy with university files on it. I had drawn a copy my schedule in ascii that I had clearly mailed to someone. It had a '*' on it for when I had a window to get to the lab to check my email each day.
Perhaps I should go back to that. 🤣
ksuwildkat@reddit
WUT?
In 1993 I paid just under $5K for:
Macintosh IIvx
14" color monitor
Personal LaserWriter LS
Word Perfect
1200/2400 Modem
Thats $11K in todays dollars.
"That was a Mac and Macs are overpriced" you say.
OK, here is a Gateway from June of 1993. Lets just go with a 486DX-33. $1895 with no laser printer, no modem, and MS Works (complete crap). Thats $4300 in todays dollars. $3400 and you couldnt do shit with it because you needed a printer or a modem to make them more than a toy.
At the time I made roughly $9 an hour working at Dillards. I say roughly because I was on commission so my paycheck varied greatly depending on how many shoes I sold. That meant I had to work 211 hours to buy that crap Gateway or 555 hours to buy my actually functional Mac.
That $9 an hour is the equivalent of $20 an hour today. In 30 hours I can buy a MacBookNeo that is 10000X more functional than that Gateway.
Anyone thinking computers were EVER cheaper than they are today is delusional.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
Life was cheaper. Computers, not so much. A floppy cost more than a gallon of gas. I'd trade expensive hardware for cheap living.
ksuwildkat@reddit
But it wasnt.
Thats over $9 a pound - inflation adjusted - for turkey. I paid $.79 a pound for my turkey at thanksgiving. Its $1.99 a pound right now.
$6.40 (equivlant) for two tubes of crest. A quick google tells me that a three pack cost $5.29 at WalMart.
We have experienced some serious spikes in prices for things in the last 12 months because the tariffs 77 million people voted for have had their exact expected impacts. So has the war of choice 77 million people voted for. Both those thigns are policy driven and can be easily reversed before they become structural. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen but in broad terms prices today are lower than they were in the 90s.
muse_head@reddit
It's nostalgia. People very often think that life was better during the time period that they were in their youth. If you get a time machine and ask some people in 1993, they'll complain about modern times and say that life was better in the 60s. Ask some older people in the 1960s and they'll be yearning for the 1920s etc.
cazzipropri@reddit
I don't dispute that nostalgia is a strong factor. But I wonder if, even correcting for nostalgia, living and working conditions were objectively better then. E.g., disposable income per family in inflation adjusted terms.
BoneZone05@reddit
When printers screamed, and pages were dragged by track
”You’ve got mail!”
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
AOL had only added access to 'real' e-mail in 92 and only had limited access to Usenet in 93.
Mobile_Analysis2132@reddit
AOL finally implemented full TLS on their email servers in the mid-2010's. Everyone of the other major players had implemented it many years previously.
Beautiful-Meaning601@reddit
I miss these days. Chebucto was the one here. Back when the internet was just smart people
Melodic-Network4374@reddit
I'm a bit sad that I missed the BBS era. We got our first modem in '93-'94 to access the internet (I was around 8 at the time), so I was definitely part of the eternal september influx. Today I'm a UNIX sysadmin with decades of experience and a graying beard, and sometimes find myself lamenting the young people who grew up with smartphone internet access and never had to understand how tech works. Funny how the cycle repeats like that.
At the time I had very limited access, the ISP would limit dialin times based on limits my parents set. When I was 13 I "hacked" the HP-UX server that ran my countries education system - it was running an FTP server, and turns out I could just anonymously download /etc/passwd with all the users and their encrypted passwords (this was before /etc/shadow was a thing). I figured out how to run Jack the Ripper to do a dictionary attack on it, and after running it for a few days I had dozens of teacher passwords.
This was really cool because every teacher got a shell, so now I had a bunch of shell accounts on a "real UNIX". Even better, I figured out that they had a dialup service that used the same authentication - so now I could bypass ISP limits by just using the hacked accounts instead. What a gamechanger!
To this day I think that bit of tinkering led me to the career I have now, I learned so much from it. Pretty sure if a kid today tried something like that they'd end up in legal trouble.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
I think 'hacking' (for the most part) was more 'innocent' in those days. I had figured out that there were spool directories on the university mainframes that did not nick your quota. We had to statically link any X11 apps at that point and so they were huge (in early 90's terms) We would complain that we had more space on a floppy than our quota on the servers.
In an (mostly) innocent hack, I put a copy of XSpaceWars that I had compiled in a spool directory and used a 200 level student account (they never seemed to be able to figure how to log out of a terminal) as the cover to put it there so if it was discovered my fingerprints were less on it.
Never got caught on that one. It was a total dick move, but also a sort of victimless crime. Most of it did not last for long as it quickly became known that I was the only one in the comp sci department that could pull half the shit off, so it made little sense to try and be sneaky about something I was likely going to be blamed for regardless. 🤣
Melodic-Network4374@reddit
Did you mean xtrek? I played that game so much :)
Absolutely agree about hacking being more innocent in those days. The internet hadn't really matured to the point where there was profit to be made, so people mostly did it as an intellectual challenge to see if they could, or to prank someone.
There was a group of teens in my country (Iceland) who were extremely prolific at finding vulns and exploiting them (real ones like buffer overflows, not like my childish stumbling). They proudly called themselves the antisec movement, and their whole agenda was that hackers should hoard exploits instead of publishing them or notifying vendors. Sometimes they'd share between themselves. If an exploit leaked, they would "burn" it by just dumping it on a public mailing list, no vendor notification - at which point script kiddies like my teen self would jump on them. It all felt like a game at the time.
I think the end of that era in Iceland came when one of them was charged with breaking into machines at a large tech company here. IIRC he was convicted, but got no jail time. I asked him about it once and he said it was all bullshit, he'd hacked many machines but not those. The company provided logs from sendmail to prove access, he tried to explain that the format of the logs didn't even match the log fomat from the sendmail version they were running but the judge had no clue about tech so he didn't listen.
Years later, a few of them started a very successful security consulting company that was eventually bought by IBM. So I guess they all made out pretty well.
Anyway, thanks for putting up with my reminiscence, I enjoyed writing it at least :)
wosmo@reddit
email updating every two hours is something I could go back to ..
marx2k@reddit
Holy shit those prices and time limits 🤣
I grew up in NYC. I don't think I've ever paid for access to a BBS. That's nuts
netgizmo@reddit
Yeah, i think the results of war dialing NYC area vrs St. Cloud MN came up with slightly different lists.
overratedcupcake@reddit
I've never paid for BBS access either. The only ones in my area that charged were either internet relays or adult content.
Randy-Waterhouse@reddit
A BBS that offered up internet service! How very fancy.
I thought my local Amiga-based BBS, with its twelve phone lines and live messaging... The Galactic Ranger Starbase... was hot stuff.
What I miss about local BBSes was that using one meant you were talking to people who were almost certainly nearby, who you could meet up with, go bowling, grab a bite, hang out. I made a lot of really great friends that way.
myself248@reddit
Oooh, do you remember what software they ran? I was on a few multi-line Amiga boards too, and yes, the coffee meetups, the diner meetups, the camping trips were legendary!
Randy-Waterhouse@reddit
I do indeed! The Starbase ran on C-Net!
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
That was the thing. I had a friend group that I ran into in the 90's that was all because I was chatting on a BBS. Went on one date with a gal and got pulled into a whole group that would talk on the BBS. A few hilarious stories from that era.
BellasGamerDad@reddit
I miss calling in to BBSs so much. It was so much fun.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
I think we need a reboot. The Great ASCII Resurgence of the late 20's. 🤣
liarandathief@reddit
My first email address was through a BBS. it was something very memorable like 1212515496875446@154.n114.z1.fidonet.org. I had no one to email.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
If you read the e-mail etiquette section, it recommends always signing your mail so they know who the hell you are. 🤣
ksuwildkat@reddit
Oh damn I feel this so much. I had a 1200/2400 baud modem for my Macintosh IIvx and would command line dial in to Kansas State University. I could pull library material and grades and not much else. I was on CompuServe for a few months and then got on AOL. When I joined AOL there were less than 250K people because a few months later I got an email from Steve Case celebrating 250K AOL members. You could, and I did, go to all of the general chat rooms in a night. I think my largest AOL bill was $200.
By 1995 I was doing tech support for a local ISP in Killeen Texas. We had tons of Win 3.0/3.1 customers and Windows didint have a TCP/IP stack until Windows 3.11 so you had to install something like Trumpet Winsock first and then get them online. Inevitably you would end up asking "Wait, do you have two phone lines?" and the answer would be no. We would have to get them to hang up and pray they remembered how to dial in. Would listen to the handshake and wait for them to call back if it failed.
Good times.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
My first web browsing was on a black and white XTerm at the uni, but my first home browsing was Win 3.11, Winsock, and Mosaic. I remember thinking it may take a while for this HTML thing to catch on as RipTerm was so much more advanced at graphics. 🤣
booknerdcarp@reddit
This brings back a TON of memories!
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
It was a wild time to be 'online'. I'll say that.
HurryHurryHippos@reddit
56K modems were all the rage... high speed!
I bought a house in 1998 that was only about 5 miles from my previous house, but in a bit of a rural area, new construction, underground utilities. After I moved in, I fired up my modem to connect to the Internet and I discovered that the phone lines ran through a "load coil" (sort of like a splitter) and the max speed I could get on any modem connection was 28.8K and most of the time, it only allowed 24K. And there was nothing you could do about it about it... the phone company only guaranteed a clear voice line.
Since it ran through the load coil, when DSL came out, that was also not an option for my house. Eventually I had to pony up the money for an ISDN line (128K max) and it was metered, meaning if I went over a certain total MB for the month, I got billed extra per MB.
Young people don't realize what it was like...
shh_coffee@reddit
You should cross post this to /r/bbs!
Believe it or not, the BBS scene is still around (free these days). If anyone's interested in reliving those days, check out https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ and hop on!
myself248@reddit
The interfaces are cute, but IMHO the magic of the BBS scene, which went wholly unappreciated at the time, was that long-distance calling was eye-wateringly expensive, so the only BBSs most people ever called were the ones within their own town or one adjacent -- their free local calling area.
Ergo, everyone on the BBS was within a bike ride of each other. It was just assumed, and it was a valid assumption, that you could have picnics in the park with the rest of the folks from the board. Organize parties and camping trips. Movie nights. Bar nights. Post stuff for sale. Discuss local news, and the new computer store that just opened.
When the internet came, we lost that, and it's never coming back.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
So I should dust off my Galacticom BBS dev kit?
A1batross@reddit
At the time I was on the board and a member of Twin Cities Free Net, a nonprofit dedicated to helping get disadvantaged folks onto the Internet. It started at freenet.msp.mn.us and I managed to drag them over onto the much-easier-to-type tcfreenet.org. It was a lot of work but it felt good helping people get up to speed on the Internet back then.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
That still would have been long distance for me. 😉
fadingsignal@reddit
When I was a kid I ran a BBS in 1992 that hosted Amiga .MOD music files. I ended up connecting with teenagers across Europe and we ended up exchanging cassette tapes and CDs thru the mail. I also met a bunch of other late-night weirdos who became good friends.
Pro_Ana_Online@reddit
That was great, thanks for posting it.
Their use of "the Internet" however was a bit of a stretch. This is UUCP over dial-up, there's no TCP/IP stack involved so it's not technically "the Internet". It's still very cool though!
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
Yup, it was like 3 years after this that I could actually use a PPP connection with a BBS proper.
TrannosaurusRegina@reddit
I'm always fascinated to see how many people live and work so closely with online services, then as now, really do not understand what the Internet is, and confuse it with services like e-mail, the Web, or even Facebook!
Unfortunately, most people are not taught this in school!
KindlyCan6816@reddit
In quegli anni acquistavo delle riviste in edicola in cui c'era un codice che ti faceva navigare 1 ora su internet. Ovviamente, a causa della lentezza del mio modem a 2400bps, avevo disabilitato il caricamento delle immagini ma le pagine web ci mettevano comunque molto ad essere caricate. Che tempi pionieristici !!!
TMWNN@reddit
Did this BBS make the transition to becoming an ISP, or did it get run over by AOL/Earthlink/Mindspring?
bokmann@reddit
Now I want to play Tradewars
MWink64@reddit
And to think this was several years before I discovered Battle.net and used up half my father's monthly allotment of Internet time in one night.
VandyMarine@reddit
I played so much Warcraft back then. Past few years I downloaded WC3 remastered - lots of people still playing today.
MWink64@reddit
Back then, WarCraft 2 didn't officially support online play (though maybe it worked with Kali). Eventually, Blizzard released WC2 Battle.net Edition.
jetkins@reddit
I remember when my favorite BBS joined APANA, which had a gateway to The Internet. My email address was @werple.apana.net.au
I started noticing a girl with similar interests as mine, in various Usenet groups, IRC channels, and MUShes.
Long story short, we got married in 1999, and will be celebrating our 27th anniversary in a few weeks. Dating apps? Pshaw! Back then, every service was a dating app. 😄
IdealBlueMan@reddit
You didn’t have to go through a BBS. If you had an ISP in your area, you could get an account with them. I had such an account, with shell access. A DSL and decent speeds, though I daydreamed of getting my own T1. In those days, things weren’t too graphics-heavy.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
I think you are off by a few years. ISDN, perhaps. It would be about 5+ years after this that I moved to an area where DSL was possible and then I was the first in the area to get it... which was it's own set of fun.
IdealBlueMan@reddit
You may be right. It's possible I had ISDN first.
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
Some BBSes gave you email and some access, others gave you a true access to the ARPAnet. AOL and others gave you about the same thing.
NotAMotivRep@reddit
No it didn't. AOL was a walled garden for most of its useful life span. They didn't provide full Internet access to their customers until their subscribers began leaving en masse for better connected services.
fuzzy-panics@reddit
Are those prices per month? Wow never seen anything like this before. Only got internet at home in the year 2000 and that was dialup. Had to use the library for internet before that. To be fair Australia was a bit behind the USA in BBS/ email internet access outside of major universities and their employees.
phire@reddit
Prices are per 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.
lee4hmz@reddit
The exorbitant prices the paid BBSes charged was what led me to for free BBSes to call in my local area back in '93. I was a Prodigy refugee (they had just started charging hourly connect time on certain parts of the site, which led Mom to let our sub lapse) and there was no way as a broke high-school student that I was going to pay even more a month for a single BBS.
LittlePooky@reddit
Years ago I was still running DOS, and I was using Xerox Ventura Publisher running under Digital Research's GEM.
I was very fortunate at that time to have a LaserJet II equipped with Adobe PostScript cartridges and 4 MB of memory to print the full page. It was a true PostScript output and it took a long time to process each page, but it worked fine at that time I was doing a weekly newsletter for a local church on base where I was stationed in the Air Force. As a black-and-white laser printer with PostScript-equipped functionality, it was doing beautiful halftones (of photos), using Datacopy scanner that I had.
It didn't really support scalable function except only to Poscript printer (and only using Adobe Type 1 font.)
There was a local BBS. Someone had told me I signed up for $50 with a lifetime membership. I was able to download type‑one fonts. These were PostScript imitation fonts, but they look fine to me. Real Adobe fonts were very expensive then, and still are.
I downloaded a ton of fonts, but later realized I only used a few. It exposed me to local BBS access; they had a local telephone number that we could dial into.
Good old days!!
LostDefinition4810@reddit
We need photos of these church banners now.
aakaase@reddit
Wow, before St. Cloud was in the 320. I miss the days of BBSes. People were local and they were friendly.
CantHardly@reddit
When St. Cloud was in 612
ScudsCorp@reddit
That’s a professional BBS which is the world apart from Biff’s Apple II ASCII express setup from ten years earlier
justdoubleclick@reddit
I remember a few years later begging my parents to sign up to an ISP.. in the end it was my grandpa who hooked me up.. he was pretty technologically advanced and wanted us all to get up to speed..
starcube@reddit
So much bad grammar and typos, feels just like a typical Usenet post. 🤣
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
The 1M daily limit was not going to get you far on the alt.binaries.* groups though.
dongdiggity@reddit
amazing!
c64z86@reddit
I love snapshots like these :D
But yeah, imagine having a 500k a day download cap in this day and age lmao. I bet it was pretty ok back then but today it is absolutely tiny.
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
Not only that, but the prices! Even with Comcast gouging, this was still more expensive than broadband today. 🤣
Several years later I got in good with another BBS in town. We had a second line added to the house I was living in and I set my 386DX33 up as a gateway for our local LAN. I could login and both of my roommates could check their mail all at the same time! One of them had an HPUX touch screen terminal and we ran phone wire up to his bedroom and patched it into the spare serial port and he just used that. We were very fancy.
c64z86@reddit
It really puts it into perspective for sure! I thought my first ever ISP download cap of 5GB a month was tiny before I read these caps haha
LittlePooky@reddit
Addendum: On page one, they sure used a horrible font for the body of the letter. On page two they didn't use curly apostrophe, and the kerning pairs were not turned on.
Haha!
EsoTechTrix@reddit (OP)
It had a very 'personal' feel. 🤣