this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Dude in that era accessing the internet was incredibly easy.
Most big ISPs had floppies or CDs you could take (for free!) that included their software (for Windows, at least) that pretty much did everything.
After Windows 95 came out, with Dial-up Networking right out of the box, the ISP software was no longer needed. There were instructional documents, and if you could follow directions, you could get online pretty easily. This made it a lot easier for small independent ISPs to start up.
That's what we need again. The independent ISPs. It was easy for them then because the phoneline pulled double-duty. I do wish we could do that again...separate the infrastructure from the provider, have a municipal fiber provider and a free-market for Internet services over the fiber.
People don't know how to follow basic directions though. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon or not. I'm nearing 40 (and rather cynical), but still feel I'm too young to really remember what it was like in the before-times.
What got hard was trying to get your modem working in Linux. Especially if you were unfortunate enough to have bought a Winmodem.
AOL did, and the others that were easy (compuserve etc) provided their own limited interface to a curated Internet.
Most providers (at least here in the UK) that provided actual tcpip did so using slip and a login screen. Which generally needed a script to login and then chain on slip to connect it to the local stack.
It wasn't until 1998 or 1999 there was widespread use of ppp and the windows 98 dial up networking could get you straight in. Then in the UK we had services like freeserve which provided simple ways to connect.
What is absolutely hilarious about this is that most European countries have this as well as a lot of other countries. It's just the US that is overrun by corporate owned broadband.
Doesn't even have to be municipal...I'd settle for a strongly regulated public/private partnership...but really nothing we have now works.
Around here, our electric service is kind of like that. You have your supply (the energy provider) and your distribution (the wire owner). We can choose our own supply but we have to have the distributor that's in the region. There's some good suppliers but there's also a lot of scams.
That's the closest analogy we have currently to what I'm talking about, but still not quite perfect, since as far as I'm aware the electric supply thing is more like a group-buy of bulk energy and weird business math.
Bruh if you lived in a rural area you might have not got dial-up until the mid 2000s