Remix.run Logo
CalRobert 4 hours ago

Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..

But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

nstory 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.

ssl-3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What a strange time machine.

The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.

I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

toast0 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.

[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.

ssl-3 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.

It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.

MontgomeryPy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What a blast from the past. I completely forgot that I was a The World customer way back when.

_joel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And now it's getting well stress tested

CalRobert 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!