Hi, everyone, I had a few questions about internet in 2002. If you lived on campus at that time did you have dial up internet? If so, could you give me any details, or stories about it? Also, did you have a phone in your dorm room? Thanks.
Most colleges had the old version of what they have now; they had a dedicated internet line way faster than a consumer could get and that was shared out via networks. Back in 2002 that may well have only been available on college computers, ones on the official campus network and I don't know how open that was to students at the time. I can't say when they moved to having a network port in every room, 2002 is probably a bit early for that. As for dial up; yes you could in theory run that down any phone line, but I think most people who were serious about the internet at the time would rather use a machine in a computer lab (or jack it's network cable to their own machine) rather than live with 56k. If someone badly needs a connection then they could plausibly figure out a way to do it down whatever phone line was available, but that's a much greater technical challenge than getting into a class room where they could do whatever they wanted at high speed.
In 2002 my college didn't have internet in the dorms unless it was dial up, then you had to get your own account with the phone company and another one with your internet provider and the whole thing cost more than what could be reasonably expected of a college student. Most people that lived off campus had cable internet because it was much cheaper and it was usually best to befriend one of these people because then you could always go over with a bottle and borrow a LAN cable and play Halo using the original massive Xbox controllers. People usually didn't like using library or computer lab machines because they were old, slow, and were full of ridiculous amounts of bloatware and really bad internet censoring programs like Net Nanny that made them practically unusable for most things. Not to mention, most of them still used Netscape Navigator for some reason. Most research at my school was still done using actual books and publications back then, so the internet wasn't really the omnipresent need it is now at school. Back then it was mostly used for MSN Messenger/AIM and 16-bit porn.
