[digitalsushi]

The memories indeed! We had a T1 and a pile of Livingston Portmaster 2e terminal servers, connected with a centrex hunt group to a single dialup phone number.

I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.

We have it much, much better than we did back then.

But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.

[yardie]

LOL. I was one of those keepalive hackers. Once I discovered newsgroups and IRC I'd leave the line up to download while I was at school. Downloading a single MP3 over 19.2kbps took the better part of a day.

[PhasmaFelis]

I remember discovering MP3s. My computer at the time could run Winamp and play music, but not do anything else (like web browsing) at the same time.