Browsing old video game magazines

[scotland]

If you like looking at old video game magazines, you find things that make you wonder.

To start, here is a Compuserve advertisement, in 1982 from a video game magazine.



It looks impressive, predicting the internet of 15 years or so in the future, even predicting online gaming with three people from across the globe (okay, the game was bridge, but the idea is right)

However, what is sometimes forgotten is the rest of the story. Compuserve charged $5 an hour, on dial-up, for this service. I 2016 that is like $12 an hour, which is what, 20 cents a minute.

Sure, we still have data caps and other limiters, but paying by the minute would have prevented exactly what the ad is predicting.

[Rookie1]

I remember AOL 2.0 had 10 cents a minute or flat rate for like $15 a month. I liked that so much better. Especially if you didnt want to pay for that, you could use Net Zero and dial in to free networks to receive email and do basic searches. I think we paid like $5 a month for a phone line. Now, I am forced in to cable because they dont have analog phone lines anymore and just a basic bottom tier cable package in my area is $80 a month, which is bandwidth caped so you cant stream anything.