So, did you cut the grass, or did you modem first?
Seriously, CompuServe was my first connection to the internet in the mid-90’s. It was too expensive to continue to use long-term, and pretty slow over dial-up, but it was cool to surf the Web (using Mosaic). Also, CompuServe thought its users might get it in trouble, so in order to connect to a Usenet newsgroup via CompuServe, you had to already know the newsgroup’s name.
Edited to add: IIRC, CompuServe was afraid it might get the same reputation on Usenet that AOL users got when AOL opened its gates to the internet; that was why you had to know the newsgroup’s exact name to subscribe to it.
I bought several Western Electric 302 and 5302 sets a few years back from a retired Bell phone technician who took them out of apartments in NYC in the 1960’s and 70’s after checking for unauthorized installations. Everything back then was stamped with “Bell System Property Not for sale” so If you were paying for a single line, they were completely within their legal rights to remove any additional phones they found by measuring ringer resistance.
It was also illegal to connect anything electrically to the system that wasn’t approved by Bell or which had passed stringent testing, Thus the acoustically coupled modem above.
I worked at a print company in Columbus in 1987, and CompuServe was one of our clients. I remember printing a pretty huge fold-out poster for them (maybe 48x60) that mapped out the entire available internet at that time. The entire internet. On one poster. And the type wasn’t even that small.
You young snots with your “2600” and your 19Kb… a real man uses a keyset and hobbles along at 30-40 words per minute!
Why?
Because that’s the way it was, And we liked it that way!
Ah, the memories of listening to a 2400 baud modem training up and connecting at something a bit faster, due to good line quality and both modems supporting the ‘fancy’ features they had.
Thankfully, this was the late 80’s/early 90’s pre-internet, so my model was a direct connect. (and my first fix of the internet was calling a local BBS that also had an internet gateway for telnet/gopher/ access…)
“BELL SYSTEM PROPERTY - NOT FOR SALE - Western Electric” - Those were the famous words found on the handset and on the bottom of every phone in the Bell System prior to the breakup. You couldn’t buy them, or sell them (legally) before the divestiture of the Bell System. I remember those days! You had to disconnect the bell inside of the “illegal” extension phones to make the phone “invisible” to the phone company test equipment.
As you will see in the documents below from the early 1980’s, consumers were notified of the pending divestiture and the choices they will have for their telephone instrument - continue to lease it or to buy the one they are currently leasing or buy a phone from other suppliers.
There are still tens of thousands of people, mostly elderly, who still lease their telephones from a successor to Ma Bell.
There was a stink a few years back when a fellow discovered his mother was still paying $30 a quarter to lease her old Harvest Gold rotary Western Electric 500 desktop sets.
He cancelled the service, but then the telephone company came and confiscated the telephones that she had been paying for since the early 1970’s. She panicked, thinking she was losing her telephone service until the Internet came to her aid and she got several “new” Western Electric phones.
A while back, I put up RSTS/E on a SIMH emulator, running on a Raspberry Pi. It ran faster on the Pi than the real 11/34 that my high school had back in the day.
I got a kick out of how RSTS/E 7.0 was not Y2K-compliant, since my high school CS teacher was warning us of the problem, back in 1980.
The first time I heard a 14.4 modem connecting I thought it was like the coolest damn thing ever with all of its new noises (like the “bong” sound when it was doing v.42bis) my 2400 modem just didn’t do.
Back in '99 I had to help someone configure an interface between my system and an old mainframe that was not Y2K compliant. IIRC there was an effort to make it compliant but it was never completed, nor was the interface that I’d been volun-told to help with. Y2K came and went, and the mainframe kept running.
(A year or so later, having heard nothing more about it, I went to delete the unfinished and unused interface from my system, and the guy complained… As of 2006, when I was finally laid off, that mainframe was still doing its job, though.)
There’s still a similar scam going on with cable companies leasing their proprietary cable boxes and cable cards to all of their subscribers. I’ve been leasing several cable cards from Verizon at a cost of $99/yr each for several years now.
