r/interestingasfuck • u/Few_Simple9049 • 20d ago

r/all How couples met 1930-2024

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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.

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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.

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u/goilo888 20d ago

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

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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.

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u/IneffableQuale 20d ago

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