Wow, great writing here, Bill. Touching stuff.

My experience was hamstrung by my locale. My parents always lived in podunk, rural places that often didn't even have cable TV, much less a local BBS or connection to one of these commercial networks. That meant that we had to pay huge "long distance" charges--it really is unforgivable how the phone companies extorted so much money from long distance; praise Cellular! So, in short, we were screwed two ways--once by the phone company and again by the private network. No way, jose.

The only time I got to interact with BBS's was when they had toll free numbers (1-800). They were few and far between. Usually they were government sites, like the SBA or Department of Energy. The people who set them up usually didn't know what they were doing, so you could hack a bit and send messages or chats with other people like yourself. It was really amazing how many people were doing that. I remember making friends with a sysop at a warez site running on a 1-800 number. Of course, the problem was that wanted you to upload "0-day warez" or some such, and of course I didn't have anything to contribute. :)

But to get back to the story, I did spend some time on PORTAL, which was supposedly the most Amiga-friendly of the private networks. My dad was very strict about what times I could be on and what I had to do. He basically used it for nothing but downloading public domain games and apps. Everything else was forbidden. So, yeah, not much fun, really, and the software we got wasn't all that great.

On a related note, there for awhile--I guess this must have been 92 or 93--you could buy a disk magazine at the mall bookstore (think it was called Walden Books or B. Dalton), that had 3 Amiga disks loaded up with public domain and shareware stuff. They always had some great mods on them too (music). Man, I wish we hadn't thrown all that stuff away so long ago. It would be great to have it today. I think I only have one old Amazing Computing left.

In the US with free local calls the whole BBS / dial up modem experience was vastly different than the European one where local calls are far from free. Being 'online' on a BBS to chat / message and type (remember the Dos Kermit program?) was hugely expensive in Europe whereas the costs in the US were relatively low compared.

Compuserve was never a big hit in the Netherlands - it was just too expensive compared to other services out there. I think it was pretty big in the UK though. I remember trying it out on my Windows 3.11 machine for a month but decided not to go for it. Instead I was on the tech campus quite a bit. Downloading stuff from ft.funet.fi and using gopher and telnet. The 'WWW' experience began in 1989 for me with it's precursors and me being a 'point' in the Fidonet BBS network.

I had huge phone bills back then.

Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | www.markvergeer.nl

Yeah, it goes to show you just how backwards the phone companies were in those days. They just didn't have a clue. In the U.S., the expectation seemed to be that the only person you'd ever want to call was people in your neighborhood. "Long distance" was defined as anything further than ten or eleven miles away (at least where I grew up). They really nailed you for it. Just to give you some idea, when AT&T's "friends and family" plan came it had the following price structure (in 1990 dollars):

After 9 o'clock p.m. and during weekends, .10 cents a minute to anywhere in the U.S.

You had to pay a fee for the plan, too, something like $20 a month. So you can imagine how that pretty much ruled out anything other than emergency calls. I kid you not; in college my grandparents were about an hour away by car, yet we wrote letters back and forth because no one could afford the long distance charges.

I've read some history on the topic, and they claim that the reason the pricing was so bad was that the government was subsidizing most of it. So they had little to no reason to innovate and no real competition to deal with. It is really a shocking example of why the government should never subsidize anything. It just encourages incompetence and corruption. The money wasted by the army and NASA is just staggering. At least the bidding/contract type system encourages competition, though it can easily be corrupted and lead to inferior stuff as well (hello, bridges falling down??)

I thought they were gone, too.

Glad to see them go! I was into Compuserve back in my C=64 days (I still have my C=64 setup), and what killed Compuserve, in my eyes, was when I had written a Yahtzee game in BASIC, uploaded it to share with everyone. The floppy I had it on jammed, so I went back online to get it again...

They added a copyright notice and claimed it for themselves!!

I cancelled my service and never went back.

Apparently, compuserve was the first with email for personal computer users and also the first with real-time chat (for PCs, mind you, not mainframes).