[h2odragon]

BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts.

There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.

[rufus_foreman]

I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second.

For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.

[jazzyjackson]

Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware/software was included in a CompuServe starter kit?

[rufus_foreman]

Hopefully someone else can answer this better than I can, but from what I remember, there was no hardware included. You had to buy an old style modem separately, like something out of Wargames.

Then you got software that allowed you to connect along with an hour of connection time.

[TedDoesntTalk]

University access.

[rufus_foreman]

My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.

[ghaff]

Some doubtless had access to the Internet in the late 70s/early 80s but random students generally did not even at universities that were connected to the Internet. When I was in school I remember someone at the AI Lab printing out a long Usenet thread related to Star Wars but I certainly didn’t have access. Indeed, outside of one class, I barely used a computer undergrad even as a non-CS engineering major.

[mattl]

For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

[rufus_foreman]

If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.

[mattl]

I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that.

Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.

[mattl]

I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.