[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[John L. Bass]

	*sigh*

	Anyone remember when shell accounts were standard with your dialup and you
	didn't have to get insurance to get one, PPP (oooh... or SLIP!) just
	worked, modems were 28.8, there was no IE, Usenet was useful, spam was
	unheard of, AOLers stayed in *their* playground, etc., etc.

	(yes, that's rhetorical... I know most of you probably *do* :-)

	Later,
	Paul

That was just yesterday ;) ... when being on "the net" was 2400 baud uucp connection,
your email address didn't have any "@"'s just bangs ("!"), your node fitted into
the Usenet map on one very readable 11"x17" page and your full usenet news feed plus
two secondary news feeds only took 6-7 hrs a day. When the upgrade to your Trailblazer
was the ultimate network connection. And there weren't really ISP's - just timesharing
vendors and a 2400 baud dialup connection to a shell account was as good as it got.
DecWriters and TI700's were "the" printing terminal to have, and ASR33's were still
everywhere. Fancy was a DT80 or VT320 glass terminal, affordable was a Heath or ADM3A
with the botched up 5x7 character set. A home unix machine was an LSI11/23 runing Xenix,
everyone else was CPM/MPM/PCDOS. If you wanted graphics you owned a Lisa or 128KByte Mac.

And then there were the days just before that where being on the net was a home terminal
(a 3270 Selectric terminal) with a leased line and a 1200baud vadic ... and everything
was unit record, and DOS/MVS/BTAM/QTAM and JCL/BAL/COBOL/FORTRAN was what computing was
all about. A few timesharing systems existed ... 16KByte Data General's and PDP11's with 
a 1MB drum for bulk file storage.

Have fun,
John