vga256<p>back in the early 90s, it was very difficult to find a means for connecting to the internet. </p><p>for the very few who did have (pre-www) internet access, it was via their university or (much less likely) through a large corporation.</p><p>and then, in october of 1994, a local nonprofit started Edmonton FreeNet: for $25 per year, you got an e-mail address, usenet access, shell access to lynx and pine, and 1mb of file storage</p><p>i hung on to my account so i'd always have access to a shell no matter where I was in the world. my friends used it as a cheap ISP for years; they would eventually add SLIP/PPP.</p><p>i always wondered how the freenet initiative got started - and learned recently that it was all thanks to the NPTN Blue Book: a National Public Telecomputing Network that distributed a software package called FreePort, containing all of the sub-modules necessary to delivery dial-up access to a small community.</p><p>the whole NTPN concept itself was way ahead of its time, and i'd love to read a book on it some day.</p><p>for the time being, i'm overjoyed to see that there have been many articles written on freenets, and <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://writing.exchange/@ernie" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>ernie</span></a></span>'s is one of the best:<br><a href="https://tedium.co/2022/04/13/internet-free-net-history/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">tedium.co/2022/04/13/internet-</span><span class="invisible">free-net-history/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/retroComputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>retroComputing</span></a> <a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/internet" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>internet</span></a> <a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/otherNetworks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>otherNetworks</span></a> <a href="https://dialup.cafe/tags/yeg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>yeg</span></a></p>