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.

> 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

I have some lovely high-quality video of dialup modems both dialling out and dialling into with good audio, which I'll post up at some point.

We still use them at work, at least until BT finally cut the copper services off at the end of the year.

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.

This was mobile internet (CSD). The similarity with dial-up wasn't really obvious from the users' perspective because they weren't explicitly making a call to access the internet. The session was established transparently when data had to be transferred, and the time this took was charged as minutes.

Operators always dreamed of a world built on circuit-switched networks that they fully control instead of packet-switched IP networks where anyone can take part and operators are just a carrier. So the big operators started the mobile internet era with the telephony model.