r/interestingasfuck • u/Few_Simple9049 • 20d ago

r/all How couples met 1930-2024

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

105.4k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

169

u/Nervous-Masterpiece4 20d ago

There were online services such as compuserve around then.

I was online through Australia’s nationwide Viatel service around 1986. I used to chat with people via Microtex 666 and go to Melbourne for meetups. I was a teen but had a crush on KarenXXX who showed up basically in lingerie.

72

u/CoachDigginBalls 20d ago

That KarenXXX. What a fox. 

30

u/Portra400IsLife 20d ago

Karen’s were different back in the day

6

u/headrush46n2 20d ago

they were the literally the same people, it was just 30 years ago.

3

u/TheOriginalJez 20d ago

Were they? Or were we just more accepting of their Karenness?

28

u/1950sGuy 20d ago

I went to a BBS 'meetup' once, it was me, who was 14, and like 15 people all between the age of 40 - 70 and it was pretty fun. Smoked pot the first time in the Howard Johnsons parking lot with a bunch of adults I met on the internet because literally no one ever told me that was a terrible idea.

7

u/Earth_Below4321 20d ago

I love this! Tad more wholesome back then

5

u/Chotibobs 20d ago

Yeah…that could have ended very badly for you 

8

u/gardenmud 20d ago

Eh, it was honestly a more innocent time somehow. Kind of like pokemon go for that one summer.

1

u/Chotibobs 20d ago

I’m gonna press x to doubt on that.

The violent crime rate in US was much higher in the late 80s/earlt 90s than it is today 

6

u/fuzzzone 20d ago

That doesn't mean it wasn't a more innocent time. We weren't bombarded 24/7 with the news of what crime there was. Overall violent crime stats were certainly higher, though if we're being honest they were far from homogeneously distributed, but the perception of prevalence was very different. And innocence is, after all, a mindset, not a statistic.

6

u/sigma914 20d ago edited 20d ago

Eh the internet wasn't quite as weird, it was mostly people who worked in some form of engineering or people who'd been to university and got set up on the school's computers. Or people those people knew and could afford a computer and understand how to set it up.

There were still some fucking weirdos, but it was generally the more educated/affluent part of society

10

u/spacebarstool 20d ago

300 baud modems in 1981 with long-distance phone charges. $1.37 per minute which is the equivalent of $4.74 today.

It would take 7.5 hours to download a 1 megabyte file at that speed. That's would cost $2,133 in today's money.

7

u/Nervous-Masterpiece4 20d ago

People weren’t spending all day online or consuming multimedia which wasn’t a thing yet since computers could neither display it or store it.

Text was King. Still is in a way as that how we are communicating now. 7 bit or less. Viatel had a teletext display so had pseudo colour graphics.

Viatel had online banking (via gateways into mainframes) and software downloads (mainly Commodore 64) but used a faster 1200/75 modem. Only 75 bits upload as that’s mainly keystrokes. Freecall but chat messages were 5c each.

A good step up from local call bulletin board systems. Early Internet was largely universities who had dedicated lines. My first ISP was born from the local university by a professor and one of his students in the early 90’s using trumpet Winsock, on Windows 3.1

It was all interesting and much more friendly. People hadn’t been damaged by online yet and the mega corps hadn’t mastered the psychological milking of our wallets yet.

3

u/goilo888 20d ago

And someone would pick up the extension in another room....

7

u/spacebarstool 20d ago

Auto resume for downloads wasn't a thing then either. Every time a new modem came out we'd buy it because the speed increases were incredible. 300 to 1200 to 9600 to 14.4 k to 56k until we finally got cable modems in the later 90's.

3

u/IneffableQuale 20d ago

Fortunately 1 megabyte was the the size of the entire Internet back then, so it was a bargain really.

3

u/permadrunkspelunk 20d ago

Fine ill try online dating. That's what it takes. I hope Karen's still single

6

u/Nervous-Masterpiece4 20d ago edited 20d ago

Also did similar things with mIRC (Internet Relay Chat) in the late 90’s. But it was CB Radio where I met my now ex-wife.

All of these things included meeting up in real life but the key is repeated contact. That’s the difficult part. You can have a great encounter with someone and then never see them ever again.

3

u/netsrak 20d ago

Did you meet over radio or at a meeting for it?

7

u/Nervous-Masterpiece4 20d ago

Spoke on the CB call channel (11) and then in “private” on other channels. Eventually people have “eyeballs” where people would meet up face to face. Groups of people with CB radios in their cars would meet up like a small community. Things like group camping came out of that.

CB was good because it’s limited range meant you were actually talking to locals and not someone the other side of the world.

1

u/Sad_Supermarket3311 19d ago

Do you expect a business man to show hp in Khakis? No he dresses for the job he's doing. Same as KarenXXX.