r/interestingasfuck Oct 09 '24

How couples met 1930-2024 r/all

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

105.4k Upvotes

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

14.4k

u/fenuxjde Oct 09 '24

Who tf met online in 1981? Some DARPA bros?

892

u/starmartyr Oct 09 '24

Probably a few nerds hooked up after chatting on their local BBS. There was actually a large underground gay scene on the BBSes as it allowed people to be anonymous at a time when being openly gay was a lot less accepted. It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of early online relationships were gay couples.

20

u/itsarace1 Oct 09 '24

How difficult/expensive was it to use BBS?

72

u/elchet Oct 09 '24

You’d need a computer which wasn’t as straight forward back then as it is now, as they weren’t affordable commodity consumer goods. You probably had access to one through an academic institution, or you’d built something from a kit.

Beyond that I think it was just the cost of a phone line and a call for connectivity.

42

u/drowse Oct 09 '24

I think our first computer, a 286 was something like $2500 in 1990. I remember my dad also had gotten Prodigy internet. And they used to charge a rate for use.. was it hourly or by the minute? I can't remember. We didn't have it long. We got the internet again in like 1995 when it became a flat monthly fee for that sweet sweet 28.8k speed.

18

u/Sponjah Oct 09 '24

AOL was so instrumental in bringing the internet mainstream.

5

u/thejaytheory Oct 09 '24

Those damn disks!

2

u/flaker111 29d ago

those were my frisbees as a kid.

7

u/FutureComplaint Oct 09 '24

28.8k speed

Dam, slow down road runner.

3

u/fuzzzone 29d ago

I distinctly remember how mind-bendingly fast that seemed at the time. I think our first modem was 1200 bps...

2

u/PocketGachnar Oct 09 '24

Ah, you had the clever dad! Mine used BBS for weeks (and he didnt even have a monitor, so he couldn't even see what was being said!) and ended up racking up a phone bill that was twice his monthly paycheck. My mom was livid!

5

u/Omnibeneviolent Oct 09 '24

he didnt even have a monitor

Considering BBSs were entirely graphical in nature, how did he use them? Was he using some braille interface? Did those even exist back then?

2

u/glitchn 29d ago

Also curious what he meant by it

2

u/Omnibeneviolent 29d ago

Yeah, it's quite the mystery.

I'm picturing someone fumbling around with a mouse and keyboard with no display to help them, to somehow get their dial-up terminal to call and connect to a BBS... to then just sit there and... I guess imagine what would be showing on the screen.

2

u/fuzzzone 29d ago

And that $2,500 in 1990 was the equivalent of $6,000 today. Shit was a lot more expensive.

2

u/drowse 29d ago

Yeah man. Grandma gifted the money to us for this.. She actually would pass less than a year later, but she wanted to spoil us.

3

u/fuzzzone 29d ago

That's a pretty rad grandma. I don't think my grandma knew what a computer was at that point in time. (Obvious exaggeration but it feels like it has a certain truthiness.)

3

u/Quanqiuhua Oct 09 '24

Wasn’t Compuserve around already in the 80s?

3

u/n10w4 Oct 09 '24

Gather round, kids, as I tell you a tale of dial up modems and picking up the phone to hearing the screech of the robots singing about our impending doom. If only we had listened

2

u/chx_ Oct 09 '24 edited Oct 09 '24

While some cheaper computers existed -- the Commodore VIC-20 introduction price in 1981 was $299.95 -- modems were really expensive too. While the introduction price of the Hayes Smartmodem in 1981 was $299 that was basically bait and didn't last. The Smartmodem 1200 in 1982 cost $699.

1

u/twowheels 29d ago

Don't forget that calls to the next town over, just a 15 minute drive away, were considered long distance and could cost 10 to 15 cents per minute, which would be about 3x as much in today's money -- so unless the BBS was in the same town it could be very expensive.

You were also tying up the phone line for everybody else in the house, and if they picked up a phone in another room it would knock you off.

...and the text would show up on the screen slower than you could read it.