Using the Internet in 1999

cat_named_easter

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Hey everyone, I have a scene in my novel where a teenager in 1999 (in the UK, if it makes a difference) is using the internet to research something. I'm just trying to figure out if I'm right in remembering that at this time, you would have connected via a telephone wire into the socket in the wall (we had a big enormous one that stretched from the study upstairs all the way downstairs to the hallway), and you couldn't really use the house phone at the same time. These are my memories of using the internet as a teenager. Oh, and it was mega-slow. Does this seem accurate for a regular home in 1999?
 

Williebee

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Can't speak to UK, but here in the US? Wellll, yes and no. Check this out. (Nice timeline graphic.) Napster started in '99, for example. We connected via a phone line, but it wasn't dial-up.

It also depends on the wealth and location of the teenager. A T-1 was $500 a month for a home user in my neighborhood in '99. Most of the folks in town, that used internet, connected to the same phone line that the phone was connected to.
 

morngnstar

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Maybe. I think I had cable internet in 1999, but I think my parents still used dial-up.
 

Layla Nahar

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I think I should remember this. I also think that around this time they started to offer dsl so that you could use the internet and make calls at the same time. I'm embarrassed to say that I've forgotten what search engines we used... There was yahoo, and jeeves, and after that I can't remember...

ETA: HotBot and Alta Vista. Alta Vista! How could I forget?

I miss those timez...


(how did I remember? I used Google...)
 
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Siri Kirpal

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Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

We still had dial-up, and no, we couldn't use the phone when the computer was in use.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

Susannah Shepherd

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From memory dial-up would be the most likely option for an ordinary household unless the parents are particularly tech-savvy / wealthy. And you get to describe the squealy modem that way too, along with the other delightful features such as trip hazards that you remember :).

The main thing to consider for your story might be less about whether they were on dial-up or DSL, and more about what information was actually available online to be researched by (I assume) a teenaged layperson in the late 20th century. There was no Wikipedia, for example; hardly anyone had heard of Google. Lots of enthusiasts, many of them extremely knowledgeable, had their own personal websites with relevant information but there was little of the 'consumer-oriented' research material we have now. I was a full-time researcher back in those days and I used the internet very little for directly accessing research materials; depending on the subject area there were some clunky catalogues and databases available, but you had to know your way around ftp and have a fairly good idea of what you were looking for in the first place. Most of what was there was oriented to academic institutions and users. Science and medicine might have offered more (written for a specialist audience) but those aren't my areas.

As an example, I was working on a research project in 2001, with the public as the expected end-users of the information. We generated a searchable electronic database including digital images, but with no thought of it going online at that stage. Things like electronic encyclopaedias were still being distributed as CD-ROMs and libraries might have a collection of searchable reference materials in that form, but you had to use them on-site.

Usenet (the forerunners of forums like this) had some highly specialised newsgroups where you might conceivably have asked questions, but I think Usenet was probably starting to drop off in popularity by 1999.
 

Catherine_Beyer

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Unless you bought two phone lines, you couldn't use the telephone and the modem at the same time, the same way you can't make two phone calls from two landline phones in the same house.

Many websites were amazingly ugly, although we didn't always realize it at the time. And pretty much all of them were very basic in their design.

And yes, it was so often slow, even with such basic websites.
 

WeaselFire

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Does this seem accurate for a regular home in 1999?

Not mine. :)

High speed cable and DSL internet was available in many areas by 1999. Others still used a modem. It really depends on your needs for your story. For example, I cannot get cable or DSL access where I currently live, so I use a cellular connection. But, where I lived in 1999, I'd had DSL access for two years. Prior to that I had a second phone line for the modem, so using a land line for home calls was not affected. Currently I have no land line.

Jeff
 

MaeZe

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I think we were using Nocharge.com a free dialup at that time. But the dates are fuzzy. Other people had cable connections but we were on cheap-mode when the Net first expanded into our home. My son was content with N64 and PlayStation. By the time World of Warcraft was the new thing, I do believe we had broadband via our cable, never did pay for DSL.
 

MaeZe

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Unless you bought two phone lines, you couldn't use the telephone and the modem at the same time, the same way you can't make two phone calls from two landline phones in the same house.

Many websites were amazingly ugly, although we didn't always realize it at the time. And pretty much all of them were very basic in their design.

And yes, it was so often slow, even with such basic websites.
Hmmm, I don't recall the free dialup ever interfering with our phone connection. I have two separate phone lines now into the house. At some point they come in through a single line to the house and split off from there. As does the cable, one line, two channels: TV and Internet.
 
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Brightdreamer

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+1 on not being able to use a phone while on dial-up (without a second line.) Indeed, I had more than one internet session interrupted when someone picked up the phone to call someone. (On the plus side, that's when we got a second line. It now comes into the house as part of the same physical wire that our first line uses, but it's its own thing. And it comes in handy to have another dialing landline. Yes, we still have landlines where we are; in a power outage, a landline will work so long as the phone line connects, as it gets its power from the line and not the house. Cell towers have gone down in outages around here, but the phone line's been rather consistent.)

You could also tell by the squawking and beeps if you were connected or not - it had a "song" to it, and if it kept going too long you knew you were having Issues.

We used MSN and NetZero, incidentally. AOL send out free disks (and, later, CDs) in just about everything they could stick a disk in - junk mail, cereal boxes IIRC, etc. - but they were always a little out of synch with the rest of the Internet and were kinda a trap for people who didn't take the time to figure out what they were doing.

By 1999, I believe most modems were 56K, which is nothing compared to broadband but it did the job... if sometimes slowly (particularly when lots of graphics were involved. Videos? Be willing to wait forever. Forget movies.)

As for ugly websites... remember the (perpetual) "Under Construction" GIFs?
 

MaeZe

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I am going to defer to people with better memories and heavier use of their phones. If when using Nocharge.com our phone was occupied, I may very well not have noticed.
 

Susannah Shepherd

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There was no broadband, cable or ADSL, available to households in the UK until 2000 (pay TV in the UK came by satellite not cable, so there was no existing infrastructure other than the copper phone network to piggy-back from). DSL was commercially available by 1999 but not everywhere, and not everyone would have made the switch even where available.

So, the original poster's scenario is definitely plausible for the UK: the character is going to be using internet coming down the phone line, and if you lived in an older house like most British people do, there was usually only one phone jack, probably in the hallway (hence the long extension cords; ours was on a little wind-up holder). If they're in an urban area and early adopters/wealthy, internet might be via DSL which means the computer is plugged into the phone lines via a special jack/filter, and you can use the internet at the same time as the phone. It's faster than dial-up, but not much! It's more likely they are still on dial-up: slow, painful and (unless you paid for a second phone-line) you couldn't surf and talk at the same time.
 

Trebor1415

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Remember that the internet isn't just the web, especially back in 1999. Usenet was still popular and depending on what the character needs to research might be an appropriate place for him to ask questions.
 

waylander

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Susannah has it as I remember it. If someone called the landline phone when you were on dial-up you lost your connection. Plenty of places still on DSL in the UK
 

oceansoul

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I was a pre-teen in the UK in 1999 and I was a pretty heavy internet user for the time. My family had dial-up on a PC upstairs. We were still at the point where my parents didn't see the point of having two phone lines, so our internet time had to be strictly limited in case someone needed to reach us on the phone.

I remember my most commonly used search engines were AskJeeves and AltaVista and the results they came up with were pretty dire by today's standards, but enough for a 'general search' or to help me find relevant books. I also remember those weird AIM search functions like Smarterchild and his ilk being a thing. At the time, I thought they were the most brilliant things ever.

I don't think I found it particularly slow ... at the time because I didn't know any better, and all the PC games I played were also pretty slow.
 

GeorgeK

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Depends on the setting. In Rural Ky the only, "provider," in 99 was AOL which stands for Always Off Line.

Despite what some would purport, the internet was more intranet and wasn't internet until roughly 2003 plus or minus a few years depending upon your locale.
 

PeteMC

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In the UK in 1999 it would have been 56k or maybe even still 28k dial-up, at best maybe ISDN if you were wealthy.

The Web was still pretty sparse then, so your teenager is probably doing his research on Usenet newsgroups.
 

Myrealana

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I remember taking a Business Technology class in 1999. One of the students did his semester project on this new-fangled search called, of all things, "Google". He was certain THIS was the thing that would change the web and make it something that someday, everyone would rely on daily. Most of us had never heard of the company, and we pooh-poo'd the idea that something like a search engine could revolutionize the internet. Who needs this "google" thing when you've got Ask Jeeves?
 

PeteMC

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I was working in IT networks in 1999 - I remember us techies liked Google because it actually found what you were looking for and that's all it did, without serving you up a load of unrelated crap you didn't want like Yahoo and AltaVista did. Oh how things change...
 

Earthling

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I was an almost-teenager in the UK using the internet in 1999. We had dial-up (DSL a few years later) and couldn't use the phone at the same time.

An extra detail that might interest you... most of the popular providers offered a plan where internet access was 1p an hour after 6pm, so my brother and I were only allowed on after then.
 

mirandashell

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I don't remember thinking it was particularly slow because it was quicker than what had come before it.

Commodore 64 anyone?

Obviously now, if we had to go back to that, we'd all go nuts.
 

Earthling

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I don't remember thinking it was particularly slow because it was quicker than what had come before it.

Yep. Even when we got DSL I often left my computer on overnight to download a few songs and that was just how it was. It didn't seem slow because it was as fast as it could be.
 

AW Admin

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Susannah has it as I remember it. If someone called the landline phone when you were on dial-up you lost your connection. Plenty of places still on DSL in the UK

It is possible to create two phone lines on a single twisted-pair line, but there are many reasons not to do that.

And yes, much as with a FAX on a regular phone line, you're disrupting an extant connection if you're using DSL or regular dialup on your voice landline.
 

darkprincealain

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We used a competitor of Netzero and nocharge.com. I forgot what they were called, but I remember a little red logo.

I also remember being a big fan of HotBot as a search engine. My, but times have sure changed.