Turning the Dial (-Up) (Off)

“NO don’t pick up the pho-”

Once upon a time, when Starbursts were Opal Fruits and the average price of a house in the UK was £67k, we used to get the internet through the letterbox. Every magazine, cereal box, and educational establishment was giving out floppy discs that offered The Entire! Internet! Free! For 50 hours!

Image Reddit r/nostalgia

But that wasn’t enough for AOL. No: not content with getting just America On Line (it was two different words then; you were on the line, not online), the Plucky Little Internet Access Company That Could decided their best marketing ploy in 1998 was to carpet the western world with discs containing The Internet. It was the original spam: flooding mailboxes with unwanted hardware long before men discovered cyberflashing.

We were most of us quite hazy on the detail of how these discs actually got us connected to The Internet back then. We definitely needed these floppy discs: their ubiquity had convinced us of that. We also knew that it was something to do with the phone line, but that something additional was required to get our beige computers connected to the promised wonders which awaited. A … modem? I was unclear, but for some time I hoped that sheer willpower alone would transform our trusty-but-self-contained Amiga computer into something a little more internetty. However it wasn’t until the glorious day this beauty arrived in our living room that the world really began to open up.

Image Apple

It’s hard to overstate my excitement when this baby came home¹, with its sexy curves, colourful semi-transparent casing, and fancy built-in modem. I still wasn’t entirely clear on the modem’s function, but built-in seemed like a very-nearly-new-century concept, so, cool. AOL floppy discs were now shiny AOL CDs (for progress, she cannot be stopped), and somehow the combination of this CD and the iMac created a ‘connect’ button which now actually meant something.

To be precise, it meant this:

For those of you whose knees don’t creak when you stand up, this is the sound of dial-up internet. While it sang this song your computer was doing something clever (or possibly illegal) with the phone line to link your computer with a whole lot of other computers all over the world. A mere shake of a lamb’s tail, the boil of a kettle and a natter with the neighbour later, and your gateway to the information superhighway was open.

Image Reddit r/nostalgia

Now you could spend hours discovering the latest in technology bulletin boards, stocks and shares, and baseball scores. Were you actually interested in any of those things? Well, no, not so much. But by the time the page had loaded, line by painstaking line, you were invested, goshdarnit. Boston have beaten the Mets? Go Sox! Valley National Corp price is plummeting? Buy buy buy!

The content wasn’t really the point, not then. The real win was in having mastered the technology far enough to feel the tangible connection. Knowing that someone in California was keying in information and it was appearing on my screen almost instantaneously was utterly magical. Dial-up internet may have been finger-gnawingly slow in the 1990s and, sure, we had teletext on the tv, but you wait until your brother jumps in front of you on page 23 of 68 so you have to wait until the quiz question comes around again. Then come back to me and talk about slow.

And email! What a revelation. I’d always been a letter-writer and adored the rush that came when an envelope arrived addressed to me. Now you could get responses in mere hours, not days! As yet unmired in marketing lists and electronically-delivered bills, you could pretty much guarantee that everything that arrived was written by an actual human and personal to you.

This is why no one under the age of 40 will ever truly understand the jeopardy involved in 1998 masterpiece You’ve Got Mail. Like, I cannot emphasise enough the fact that most times you connected to the internet you really, really did not have mail. That electronic ping (if you had speakers connected to your computer) to tell you there was a new email in your inbox? Some rush, man. And the possibility of such connection was there for you any hour of the day or night - as long as no-one else in the house was using the phone. Or might be about to.

For here was the true tragedy of the late 1990s: how frequently a young person’s thirst for connection and digital exploration was stymied by their parents’ selfish desires to use the phone that they paid for, in the house that they also paid for. Later there were splitters and dedicated lines and ways to remain online even when someone else had to call their friend / family member / local police station, but in the early days of domestic internet the mere act of trying to make an outgoing call would result in abrupt disconnection for the unfortunate digital traveller.

Complicated prioritisations had to be established and sometimes documented to avoid gazumpers. Time slots, rotas, exceptions criteria. People like to say it was a simpler time but, friend, it was not. Usage rights of the sole family computer required negotiation skills more usually encountered in hostage situations. Unfortunately I regularly weakened my own position by also being a teenager and requiring several hours of talk-time with friends each evening on top of my internet needs. I suspect it was a relief to all concerned when I moved out. To be fair, if I’d remained living at home for just a couple more years, texting became a thing and I soon would never need to speak verbally with anyone on a phone, ever ever again. That would surely have bought me another hour or two of AOL time?

All this is to say, fibre broadband and personal mobile devices have proliferated to the extent that AOL will finally shut down their dial-up internet service at the end of next month. This latest marker of Time Passing has me nostalgic for those heady early days when the internet seemed so shiny and full of promise, and was less full of … well. You know. I don’t imagine The Internet arrives in a disc through the mail anymore, though if you’re not connected to the internet, how else would you get hold of the software? - hold on a mo, let me just Ask Jeeves.

1. The previous baby that had been brought home 6 years earlier was also exciting and to be fair to her she’s aged a lot better than the iMac