Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
I miss the magical time when Compuserve, AoL, Yahoo, and more, all had to compete with eachother, and all you need to use ALL of them was that initial dial-up connection.
Then AoL bought Compuserve, AT&T bought Yahoo, and all along it went to shit in a million different little ways.
Yeah. Part of that is the same kind of nostalgic for me, but also I guess I miss the feeling of the internet being somewhere you go, deliberately, rather than always-on, always-connected, pinging me with attention-sucking notifications constantly.
Like when you sign into AOL messenger in the dial-up days. That was an indication you wanted to chat and had set aside time for it; it was like flipping the sign from "closed" to "open". Now, you're just always expected to respond.
@MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
I suspect you can still do PPP with a cell phone. The ones I have still have PPP dialer software in the base system. It would take some hacking, but looks possible. You could test with a NetZero dialup account.
Yeah, dial-up isn't the part I miss.
Interesting. I've only ever had success with cellular PPP when using #777 for carrier based DUN back before mobile broadband was a thing.
Too many fun ideas and too little time to explore them ...
Yeah man, you're speaking my language. Back when seeing someone as "online" generally meant they were deliberately there, not just that their phone was on
CompuServe was the way I first experienced the internet way back in 1993.