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Comment by SAI_Peregrinus | Hacker News Reader

When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time.

That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.

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That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.

NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.

A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.

That was a ton back then! I suppose 300TB/month is a lot too but it doesn’t feel that big anymore

I’m not sure what people are doing at home, but that seems a hell of a lot to me to me. I use 3-10TB a month and thought that was a lot.

I don’t think it’s about people doing it at home, but how we don’t really blink an eye when a terrabyte is mentioned. We will even start getting 60TB drives in a few years.

Yes, and in the 90s that was a truly incredible amount of data, when most of their customers were probably transferring a few tens of megabytes per month at most.

I don't think I even had 18GB of disk space back then.

My dad bought a 600mb disk at vast expense. What did your dad have?

For as long as you'd pay the phone bill plus isp sub.

When I ran an ISP or two back in the dialup days, we advertised unlimited, but we didn't mean anything with that word, it was just what every other ISP also used in their marketing, we were just following along. The same is true today with Cellphones and ISP's, they ALL offer "unlimited", but they all have different interpretations of that word. As far as I can tell, none of the employees understand what "unlimited" means either.

Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".

If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.

Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.

Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.

Different times for sure!

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