| ▲ | nstory 4 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 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/ |
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| ▲ | 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. |
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| ▲ | 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. |
