I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
twas the year 1996, I had been online for 3 years, 28.8kbps wasnt doing it anymore, got a 56kbps US Robotics modem (wikipedia says 56k wasnt available until 1998 but that’s wrong, 1998 was when I started college and I had a 56k modem at least 2 years prior to that).
internet access was run by the county, so we dialed into a server (named “homer”) and then it either acted as a proxy or basic NAT to provide access to the public internet. speeds were glacially slow compared to modern day standards, I played a lot of MUD’s (smaug codebase mostly - Realms of Despair, etc). the internet was very much a different animal back in those days.
Oh way before my time! But I think we never had softphones like that. The possibility only started with y splitters in ISDN times.
I want to say that I first experienced a y-splitter like that when I had DSL in ~2003, with filters on the phone lines. softphones - I used Avaya at a job in ~2007 or so and then never saw it again until recently at my current job, though we have mainly transitioned to Amazon Connect/Microsoft Teams/Cisco Jabber for telecom stuff across most of the divisions (event starting to transition away from VOIP desk phones).