Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense.

I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.

So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.

When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.

I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.

In the early 2G GSM days, you would connect via "CSD" (Circuit-Switched Data[0]) which essentially emulated a dial-up connection (except it was digital the whole way) and that was billed per minute. Using HSCSD you could bundle multiple CSD channels for higher bandwidth but the minute charges were per channel so the cost added up.

By the time phones got built-in WAP browsers, GPRS had arrived which was billed per byte, but CSD was still supported (I remember using it once or twice in a certain building at uni where GPRS never worked for some reason)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_Switched_Data

Very early on, mobile data was essentially an emulation of an analogue modem call, at blazing fast rates like 19200baud or less, held over the same channels as voice calls with a bit of extra jiggery-pokery, and were charged by the minutes just like voice calls. Sometimes they were charged as normal voice calls, sometimes you ended up being charged extra (or not being charged extra as such, but with data calls not being counted in any pre-paid minute allowance your plan had). It was vitally important to check this before making modem calls, as some providers charged data calls in the same band as premium rate voice calls, meaning that just picking up a few text emails could be quite expensive.

[cue misty eyed memories of trying to get my Psion 5mx to connect to the Internet by infra-red serial link to my phone, to try get updated connection information for my next train as the one I was on was going to be too late to make the planned connection…]

Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.

If you were used to dial-up internet, (IE, where your computer was plugged into a phone line and made a phone call to your internet service provider,) that's a reasonable assumption to make. Some early services billed by the minute, too.

No it wasn't. But my previous connection was dial up, and there were no costs provided for the data at all in the documentation I received.

It was one thing to use the line to call an ISP, which can be a company of its own, and another to use their Internet access on that call.