Member dial-up bills?

i remember it just like it was yesterd-

oh shit

>dial up
>2015

I remember back in high school one of my friends was really into Ultima Online. Every night for a month he would leave his character logged in and bot for skill ups or something. I guess he was on some pay-by-the-minute dial-up plan and his parents ended up with a bill for like $1500 dollars.

Was pretty hilarious at the time.

I this new? How?

Mostly people who actually live in the middle of nowhere. AOL wouldn't be offering dial-up in this day & age if there wasn't a market for it.

My mom still has dialup. Glad I moved out I guess.

>not living off free AOL trial discs for nearly a decade while bitching about AOL being a piece of shit

noob

i remmber my friend on aol downloading warez
they charged by the hour

it wasn't funny at the time

Dialup was a chore when loading a website was like a 80kb job. Good and well optimized pages were around 40kb around 1999.

Now the average website is several megabytes so it is nearly impossible to use it nowadays.
It would be tolerable if sites were still under 100kb but not with sites like today where the front page is 10 fucking megabytes.

>be 10 year old me
>just found out about internet
>downloading some video
>telephone rings
>omg nooooooo

>user is using the line for his dialup
>his telephone rings

>mfw

Did you need a credit card to use those? My parents tried to be protective and actually limited me and my sister to the age-appropriate kids/teens settings (which ultimately lead me down the path of programming and lurking Sup Forums for over a decade), but now I'm wondering if I could've just made my own adult accounts from trial disks all those years ago.

What the fuck is this bill

>play runescape
>phone rings
>fug

You did, there was a very short period of time before credit cards could be authorized online and you could use a cc-generator to get an account that would work for a few days before getting terminated.

The best way was to IM phish on AOL. Shit was so fucking easy just cruise through chatrooms getting usernames and send some bullshit message about needing their password, probably worked 1% of the time, which is impressive.

There were also groups (chatrooms) where people gave away phished accounts on the regular.

You fucking idiots. The Phone couldn't ring when you occupied it with your internet usage.

call waiting would do this, retard

some dumb liberal fantasy
my internet bill was like $35 back when dialup was popular

I member my isp sending me emails (to my isp email account so i never saw them) trying to get me to sign up for isdn lines because i was always online and they were losing money on me.

>fantasy
lolwut.
you clearly wasn't around back then.

back then it was common to pay per minute and if you let some ignorant family member browse for days or forgot to shut off the connection after you're done, it was easy to pile up hundreds in bills.
on top of that there were malware that made people dial up expensive numbers for connections or they were dumb enough to dial them themselves which even led to bills like in the OP.
I highly doubt this was still going on in 2015 though and should be a thing of the past since the mid 00s.

>autodialer malware
ugh, good thing my parents put a lock on toll numbers

It's an American thing. 40% of the American population is still on dial-up.

>you will never get internet discs in the mail ever again

>muh liberal hourly rates
you sound smart, i guess compuserve, genie, prodigy and aol were all just fantasy huh

>be 12
>find "free_hentai.exe"
>"just dial this 20 digit number and download all the sexy cartoons you want"
>too dumb to get it to work
probably dogged a 10.000$ bill by being tech illiterate

>Be in Murica
>want internet
>have to buy tv, phone and internet in a super exclusives singles plan that also gives me a ps3.
>$90 a month
>mobile internet also included a whopping 500 MB a month
>I'll try another company
>they are the only company in the entire town

I don't know why they are crying so much it's not like shit is so good for them now anyway.