Ask Lemmy

I got my first "home computer" for Christmas in the early 80's. A TRS-80 CoCo with 16k RAM. After sending in the warranty information I started receiving nerd junk mail some of which I'm pretty sure I still have somewhere. One is an add for internet access from Compuserve. It cost $7 an hour IIRC. You had to use dial up and call long distance to Columbus, OH which probably cost somewhere around 50 cents a minute using my 1200 baud modem. Young teenage me couldn't afford the luxury. I also received a slender book of websites. Domain names weren't a thing so you had to know the ip address of what you wanted to look up. BBS's were more accessible to me. Sometimes in the early 90's I fumbled around on a computer at the library and saw weather forecasts and another time I searched Lexusnexus for an article about modifying hand held GPS units to increase accuracy. The public wasn't allowed the accuracy the military had (US). By the time the internet caught on thanks to AOL I hadn't messed with computers for ten years but picked it right back up now with a 36.6k modem. I know this is going to sound gross but I remember some of the earliest news reports regarding the internet were about pervs using it to share child porn. Does anyone else remember this? BBS's were used by mob bookies to take gambling bets. IIRC the Supreme Court decided the owners were responsible for monitoring and preventing the mob from doing this. Obviously this was all quite awhile ago and my memory is fallible