back in the early 90s, it was very difficult to find a means for connecting to the internet.
for the very few who did have (pre-www) internet access, it was via their university or (much less likely) through a large corporation.
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
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.
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.
the whole NTPN concept itself was way ahead of its time, and i'd love to read a book on it some day.
for the time being, i'm overjoyed to see that there have been many articles written on freenets, and Ernie Smith (npub1v23…6xmy)'s is one of the best:
https://tedium.co/2022/04/13/internet-free-net-history/
#retroComputing #internet #otherNetworks #yeg
