Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...

kalleboo 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the early 2G GSM days, you would connect via "CSD" (Circuit-Switched Data[0]) which essentially emulated a dial-up connection (except it was digital the whole way) and that was billed per minute. Using HSCSD you could bundle multiple CSD channels for higher bandwidth but the minute charges were per channel so the cost added up.

By the time got built-in WAP browsers, GPRS had arrived which was billed per byte, but CSD was still supported (I remember using it once or twice in a certain building at uni where GPRS never worked for some reason)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_Switched_Data

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense.

I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.

So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.

When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.

I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.

	▲	soco 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Things I learned today: the very first mobile (cellular) data protocol was indeed dial-up over the GSM voice line: namely the CSD. What I had in mind - GPRS - came only later... so yes, even on mobile it was initially billed by minute. Wow.

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mathgeek an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.

	▲	ffsm8 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute. Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines. While the phone still had a dedicated line it didn't actually need a power connection, as the power through the phone wire was sufficient.