Online Services: The Internet Before the Internet

jfruh writes "The Slashdot readership is probably split pretty evenly into two groups. There are those for whom full-on Internet access has been available for their entire computer-using lives, and then there are those who wanted to use the Net from home before 1991, and who therefore had to use a BBS or an online service. Here's a tour of some of these services, including Prodigy, Compuserve, and of course AOL. This should be a nostalgic trip for the oldsters among us, and a history lesson for Gen Y readers."

Comments

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[johnb10001]

I started using the internet around 1978 when I was in college. We had super fast 9600 baud terminals back then and about a dozen Universities were connected to the internet at that time. After graduation I had Compuserve which if I remember right it costs ten dollars a month plus additional time while online. It the 90's AOL bought Compuserve and I switched over to Netscape for email. During most of the 80's I used dial up bulletin boards for games and discussion boards.

The Source?

[kallen3]

does anyone remember The Source? Where Ilearned about archie, gopher, telnet,finger,who, ftp and the like. I remember the first time I connected I went exploring on the source and realized that I was connecting to computers all over the world.

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[johnb10001]

This Wikipedia article shows the modem types and years released. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[FishOuttaWater]

He said terminal, not modem.

BBC - BBS - The Documentary

[Cheech Wizard]

BBC - BBS - The Documentary - Find it. It's really good. 8 episodes. Some of it is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnSz-Hb9LQY

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[Gription]

Bullshit.

9600 didn't show up until the mid 1980s. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-29.html

If you're gonna lie, at least do some research first so that those of us from that era might believe you for a sec.

Bzzzzzt thankyouforplaying...
AT&T supplied 9600 baud data lines for the ARPANET way back in the late 60s. And yes... They used modems!!!
Almost all of the endpoints for the ARPANET were universities. That would make someone that claiming to use a 9600 baud terminal in the late 70s easily accurate and using a technology that was at least a decade old.

So I suspect two things: (1) You weren't there. (2) You are an anonymous idiot who can't Google.

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[TheRaven64]

When the use of compression grew in modem transfers, baud often stayed the same, or rose slower than the bit rate due to the compression.

It doesn't have anything to do with compression. The baud rate is the number of symbols per second. The bps rate is the number of bits per second. When you have two kinds of symbol (e.g. beep and silence, high and low) then the baud rate is the same as the bit rate. If you have 4 kinds of symbol then each symbol represents two bits and so the bit rate is double the baud rate. With better ADCs and DACs (and a sufficiently low SNR) you can distinguish a lot more different symbols at the same baud rate. If you could distinguish 256 different tones then a 300 baud modem could run at 300B/s (2400b/s).