Ask Lemmy

I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

A lot of these services' business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you'd pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you'd see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS's with funding.

All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn't even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim "I just talked to a guy in Australia!" as the most eye-opening first experience. That's a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you're an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.

Started, pre-Internet, on BBS systems at 300 baud.

It was definitely interesting. Good sense of community.

I used Usenet and anonymous FTP, archie and gopher, in the days just before the creation of the web. I actually thought the web was weird when my ISP started trying to push it, and couldn't really understand why they were making such a big deal about it and taking so much trouble to explain to me all the things I'd have to do to get hooked up with it (which were significant). It seemed like just a bunch of weird-looking pages and not all that useful. Weird bomb-making recipes in text files from anonymous FTP seemed a lot better.

CompuServe had a very different feel as opposed to the community-run places like FidoNet and Usenet. It always sort of felt like a Dollar General version of the internet, where all the shelves are a little disordered and no one's really paying that much attention to what's going on. Usenet and FTP were very cool. There was wild stuff on there.

Getting access to email was very cool. Before that it was sending letters, or talking on the phone with family members or random strangers walking around hearing you. Getting a physical letter from someone you were distantly-connected to was very cool in a way that's not replicated on any electronic network, and email seemed initially like it was better, although I think now that in letters we lost something important.

Probably the most massive difference between now and those days is something I don't see people talk about very much: Before the internet, there really was only 1 viewpoint and 1 viewpoint only on the news. US soldiers were the good guys. Neoliberals in government are looking out for you. Criminals are bad. It's just... it's hard to explain, because now there's such a wealth of different opinions and ways of looking at things that it seems normal, but back then it was very rare to get your hands on even one little piece of "subversive" viewpoint. When the Rodney King beating made the news, it was really electrifyingly shocking; at least to the white world, the idea that the cops would ever do something wrong or could even be charged with a crime was aberrant and confusing. They found the cops not guilty in the first trial. It was just too much to take on, to change the jury's world view around to that they might have done something illegal, even with the whole thing on video.

I got an issue of Adbusters and it was like this wild precious thing, an artifact from some other world. I was visiting somewhere when I found it; it wasn't available in my hometown. On the early internet, I was reading a message board where some people were talking about tactics fighting against NATO troops, and it was fucking mind blowing. Like... they're the enemy. How can they be allowed on the internet? Like people? And then I started downloading episodes of "Off the Hook" and issues of 2600, and it sort of was this gateway into this whole other way of looking at the world. I read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and around that time this whole other type of media came along, and in about 5-10 years it became, silently but inexorably, an acceptable thing. But when I was growing up, it wasn't.

It's not gonna be possible, I think, for someone from today to really understand how blinkered the view was of the world for 99% of people, before the internet came along. I don't know how well it will translate to today, but I remember Spin as another big watershed at the time, in showing me how much fakeness was in a lot of what I thought was real.

In the '90s I occasionally dialed into a local BBS. Simple as it was, it felt like a glimpse of the future. Universities and businesses had network connections, even if it was only a LAN, but home computers at that point were typically standalone devices that you used by yourself. The idea of interacting with other far-away people from my house was so incredibly cool.

Starting when I was in 7th or 8th grade (late 80s - early 90s) I started playing on MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), a precursor to an MMORPG that was all text based. It was part game, part chat room. It was not until a couple years later that I played regularly. They were not really an online service, but I did use aol as my isp starting in 96, but only to connect to a MUD or EverQuest.

I first got online with CompuServe when I was just 7 (first online in 1992, just 1 year after the start of the World Wide Web going public) I was a weird kid that loved reading, and I had been reading my parents encyclopedia Britannica collection and found the entry for "the internet" and was instantly enamored with the idea and begged my dad to get it. I spent a lot of time in chat rooms, but I also played the Neverwinter Nights MUD.

It was great, to me being a kid. I'm sure it wasn't so great for my dad who had to pay for it. That shit was expensive back in the day! You had to pay the subscription itself and per minute on the phone, and the NWN game was a separate subscription! I was fucking spoiled when I look back at what I had and how much my parents had to have been paying for it all. 😭

I am still very much in love with the internet. Especially when it comes to chatting and gaming 😎

Yes it was fascinating.

i want to point out those things weren’t before internet; they were before the world wide web

Don't see mention of Q-Link (a C-64 specific large scale discussion service) much anymore, so had to comment. It was cutting edge to be part of something like that, and yes, it could be expensive - 5 cents a minute for some functions which could add up since it was all dialup. Anyone now looking back would see it as crude and basic, but it was a huge step up from the local BBSes. Chat rooms for all sorts of things, real time direct messaging with friends you made online, even file transfers while you chatted. Later years even played with 2d avatars that could walk around from place to place. Only years later after being an AOL user did I learn than a lot of AOL's infrastructure was built upon the old Q-Link system.

As a a side note, it was mind blowing to be exploring the deeper parts of AOL and find the the door to the REAL internet. AOL wanted users to stay within AOL for all their needs and not as a portal to everything else.

It was expensive so you watched your time like a hawk on the paid services. Played games a little time in chat rooms.

Spent a fair amount of time on BBSs, some had turn based games where you would log in every day to use your turns. Or pirated games, sometimes you would pay to download or you had to maintain a positive upload/download ratio (much like torrents)...

I just went through a house move and unearthed a spiral-bound CompuServe user's manual from 1985. I have hand-written notes on the inside cover with the billing rates around that time. Cost was broken down in two tiers, prime time and after hours and then further by the speed you connected.

300 baud cost $12.50/hour in prime time and $6/hour in the evenings. 1200 baud cost $15 and $12.50. 2400 baud cost $22.50 and $19. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35/hour. Inflation-adjusted that's $55/hour for a 2400 baud prime time connection.

2400 baud modems were brand new in '85 and it would still be a few years before they were widely used. I'd been running a BBS since '82 so I always wanted to be ahead of the curve for speed and compatibility.

This was sort of the beginning of the end for CompuServe's real success. 1985 was also when local BBSs started to figure out how to federate and link up. FidoNet was really starting to take off and if you were a CS Major you probably had access to the proto-internet in the computer lab on campus at your college. It wouldn't be until 1990 before the first search engine existed, though.

I took a bunch of terrible photos of the book but then found that Internet Archive has the whole thing scanned in great quality.

Here's some photos of the book I have here because the artifact is kinda cool just itself: https://imgur.com/a/XQWi9cK

Here's the scan: https://archive.org/details/compu-serve-information-service-users-guide/mode/2up

That first photo on Imgur of the book's cover is 3.1mb. It would take 174 minutes to download that file at 300 baud. A blistering 21 minutes at 2400 baud. It would require 3 floppy disks to store it.

The text of this Lemmy post? 1,884 bytes which would take 6.3 seconds to send at 300 baud.

I first went online with CompuServe. I didn't use a computer, I had a teletype connected to a 300 baud modem & an acoustic coupler. Back then, AT&T didn't let you connect directly to the phone system. A year later, the vic-20 came out and I used that.

I actually met my second husband on CompuServe. We both were members of the Adventure game forum and knew each other by name from there.

A few years later, a friend of mine had a birthday party on ICQ for my (now) husband when I was separated and here we are 24 years later.

CompuServe is where I got to get my adventure and crpg fix

I am old enough to recall pre internet. Even had a few physical letter pen pals.

Email was mind blowing.

Hell, even just the concept of digital encyclopedia, not even on the internet, was game changing.

I miss dialing 0 and instantly getting a real person to help you though.

I remember it being pretty incredible that there were other users out there I could talk to. I had heard about email and I got an address! I didn't know anyone to email, but I had an address! Chat was amazing. BBS systems offered text games, like LORD - which also took things to a new level. Participation in discussion forums on BBSes and AOL led me to forums on the Web. At school we used to use gopher but the www was more fun (if you could see past the construction sign graphics) and you could always see the hit counters and guestbook links on most pages. Then the construction signs got more sophisticated and animated😀 The early-mid-90s Internet was glorious. Google showed up after Yahoo was too littered with ads.. Some guys in college made a search engine that prioritized speed - dreadfully important at analog speeds..

Mostly usenet which was federated forums. Then we moved to centralized forums on the web and now we're back to federated.

A town center near me allowed us to etch random thoughts onto the columns. They said that was the ancient Romans equivalent to "forum shitposting".

I once had a laptop that had AOL installed on it from the factory, I only started the program one or twice out of curiosity as I got the laptop from a Swedish retailer in Sweden....

Ran my own BBS. Dual node, too.

Fun fact: I had considered making a way for Tag BBS to dial other BBSs and share posts. Federation of the phone line. Never got to it, though, the internet hit hard.

I remember being 10-11 and going on Usenet and finding adult forums. One was called co-ed. I never knew what it meant, but it had hotties on there. I remember feeling like such a computer wizard.

What does that even mean pre Internet? Like before IP addresses? I'm serious, the Internet is older than me.

Prodigy was fucking amazing when I was 8 or whatever.

And BBSes.

People were almost universally very nice to everyone. There wasn’t all that much competition for space and generally tech interested people abounded.

I used to log into BBSes back in the day. I got to meet some pretty cool people, and had a few wild experiences.