I was there Gandalf 😂

@calicuz You didn't need to be one to see them; you should have definitely seen them.

@calicuz lol I think actual boomers might have gotten these instead 🤣🤣

@calicuz If you had a US postal address, they sent MANY copies.

The offer of free hours kept growing. I got some--I think that they were purple--which had over 3,000 free hours. I think I threw away all the extra ones I had sitting around sometime in the late 1990s.

@userfawkes1105

I can honestly say that I have never seen the cartridge. Maybe they thought the future was access through gaming consoles.

@SomeMichGuy

Yeah, then they figured out to sell it like phone service, rather than by the minute.

@calicuz Well, they were part of the dial-up era, so it WAS a phone-based service.

For years, the "last mile" of home internet access was a dial-up phone link using modems.

The first version of the US's internet backbone used T0-speed phone lines (56 kbps, a single-channel digital phone circuit), which was upgraded under the NSFNet project to T1 (1.544 Mbps, or just over 27.57x T0), then THAT backbone was upgraded to T3 (44.736 Mbps, or just under 29x T1).

Let's see...these wikipedia articles

[ihttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signal_1

]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signal_3[/i]

use different multiples, likely due to overhead when you actually multiplex the data; as the first articke notes:


[This is always the case; people used to post actual throughput measured on "10-Mbit" ethernet cable, and the overhead of the protocol, etc., reduces that a bit.]