> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I’m sure we fairly quickly (as in fairly quickly after 56k became a thing) had zero call rate ISPs who just charged a small monthly. We used to use FreeUK (eventually taken over by Clara), and had a second line dedicated to it.
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I am still liamproven@aol.com to this day.