When 20 hours online triggered an email from the president of my ISP, Ars Technica

“Checking the system this morning, I noticed that your account has been logged in for over 20 hours,” begins a December 1998 email from the president of my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) at the time. “Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually use the connection while connected.”

Today, when it seems like everyone is online 24/7 via smartphone and broadband, I’d be weird if was not online for 20 hours in line. But 1998 in Raleigh, North Carolina was different. In an age of copper phone lines and dial-up modems, accessing the Internet wasn’t usually an always-on situation for a home user in the United States. Every busy phone line meant another ISP customer couldn’t use it and no one could even call you.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, why do I have an email from 1998?

A voice from the past

I save everything. It’s just what I do.

Being an amateur data archivist has served me well during my career writing about technology. About eight years ago, I decided to go through my archives for old email files and import them all into Apple Mail for OS X, organizing them chronologically so I could look at them all in one place. I found out that Internet email dates back to 1995 when I started using a POP3 client instead of Pine. Flipping through emails from 1998, I found a curious nugget from another era that blew me away.

From: Eugene J. Fourney III
Date: December 18, 1998 11:21
Subject: Online for 20 hours straight

Thank you for allowing NetWorks to provide Internet service.

I write because this morning checking the system, me
I noticed that your account has been logged in for over 20 hours.

Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually use the
connection while logging in. This has not been the case on some occasions
your account.

We have to ask you to take steps to ensure you log out afterwards
any session. Our resources must be shared among many customers,
and the only way to do that is for people to close the file
connection when they are not actively using it.

Please help with this by checking your dialer settings and setting it up
to log out after 30 minutes of inactivity. Please also uncheck the
option in your email program that automatically checks for email every 10
minutes or set it to a number greater than 30 minutes.

If you need help locating these settings or want to discuss them
also, please contact me at this email address or at our offices at
518-0351 or 518-8034.

Gene Fourney

I vaguely remember getting this email and thinking it was ridiculous because the connection was supposedly “unlimited”. My family paid NetWorks a monthly fee (a $24.95 “Family Plan” for three user IDs) that allowed me, my father, and brother to connect to the Internet as much as we wanted—or so I thought. I showed the email to my dad, who shrugged it off.

Between 1995 and 2000, I used a dial-up ISP, which meant I had to call the ISP using a regular copper phone line and a dial-up modem that ran anywhere between 14.4Kbps and 56Kbps over the years. Since most people also used their phone lines to talk with their voice, there was an underlying assumption that most calls to the ISP would be temporary. If your line is busy, you will lose incoming calls. In my situation, my parents had set up a second phone line exclusively for my BBS in 1993 so that I could spend as much time online as needed without worrying about blocking incoming phone calls to my family.

A key issue I had with email was the implication that I wasn’t using my internet connection during those 20 hours. I’m pretty sure I was using it, and not just to automatically check my email every 30 minutes like the email suggests.

My first adventures with the modem (with a BBS) took place in 1992, so by the end of 1998 I felt like an online veteran. I maintained my own website and one for my father’s company. I often played MUSHe, MUD and Latest Online, and was also active on a multi-user graphical chat called WorldsAway. I used ICQ to talk to friends and was ranked in checkers on Yahoo! Games. There were so many things to do on the internet, even in 1998.

But recently, I’ve been thinking: Is there another way to see exactly what I was doing that day? I have most of my files from the era, so I recently looked them up and discovered logs from a MUSH (text file transcripts) dated December 16th and a MUD a few days later. I also found some WorldsAway screenshots from around that time. On WorldsAway, you received world currency every hour or so you were logged in, so I sometimes lazed around with a special tool that kept you from getting kicked.

December 18 was Friday. If you take the time of the email (11:21am) and subtract 20 hours, that means the connection started around 3:21pm on Thursday, December 17th. According to an old high school calendar I found, Christmas break was supposed to start the following Monday, and the 18th was exam catch-up day, so I probably had the day off. So it’s entirely possible that I stayed up all night on the 17th cruising the information superhighway.

Twenty-hour sessions, while rare, weren’t unheard of. I particularly remember sitting on a MUSH for 20 hours straight circa 1994 when connected through the NC State University Dataswitch (just before the local ISP era).

My first ISP was Nando.net, run by my local newspaper The News and Observer in Raleigh, starting around 1994. In 1996, Nando decided to sell his ISP business to MindSpring. While many families switched to MindSpring, my father chose NetWorks, a local newcomer that promised a smooth transition and a reasonable price for “unlimited” monthly Internet access. According to an email I found in my archives, NetWorks had about 2,500 subscribers in 2000.

The point of view of the ISPs

Digging further into my archives, I discovered similar emails from NetWorks or its president Gene Fourney dated 1999 and 2000, referring to being connected 24 hours with no activity. One just before December 3, 1998 he thanked me (impersonally, by letter) for “having worked to decrease [my] usage”, suggesting that an attempt to reduce idle callers hogging phone lines was a common occurrence for NetWorks.

Apparently, this was also a problem with other dial-up ISPs at the time. After recently posting the December 18, 1998 email to Chirping and Bluesky, I started hearing from former ISP employees. On Twitter, Jim Antonio he wrote“He worked for a small dial-up ISP 95-98 and we did the same thing: warn heavy users of their usage. We didn’t do that much, but we had a handful of users who basically never disconnected. We suggest they switch to ISDN which has unlimited option.”

Another Twitter user he wrote“I worked for a small dial-up ISP in the late 90s. On Friday nights people would sometimes call and complain about busy signals if one of the dial-up pools was full. I would check the system and reset the ports of the longest logged in to free up some lines.”

Even AOL has had a problem with unlimited internet plans. After switching from hourly billing to unlimited connected time in October 1996, five angry customers sued AOL because increased demand clogged AOL’s networks. (Before that, AOL was $9.95 a month with five hours free, plus $2.95 for each additional hour, or $19.95 for 20 free hours, plus $2.95 for each additional hour.)

Interestingly, while I initially focused on the alleged injustice of not having “unlimited” Internet time (or the implications of that from email) back in 1998, today I sympathize with the limitations of hogging a phone line that could potentially be used by other customers.

Today, Gene Fourney is the CEO of IT company TechnologyWest in Denver. I thought this story would not have been complete if I had not attempted to contact him. I emailed him, asking him a few questions about NetWorks at the time, but he wasn’t interested in reminding. “I’m not revisiting a problem you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks,” Fourney wrote. “Times are radically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. I’m not sure why anyone would be interested in revisiting 1998’s 28,000 days of dial-in access.”

It’s a little strange to me that even 25 years later, Fourney is still playing the no-nonsense administrator role, and I’m the rebellious kid abusing the Internet’s resources. The tone holds. He’s the boss, and honestly I don’t mind him; Fourney isn’t the bad guy here. He was trying to run a small business and I’ve always liked NetWorks as an ISP. Poetically, his 1998 email reminds us that there is another path in life that isn’t continually online, even if that wasn’t his intended message in 1998. And considering that many people today voluntarily put limits on their screen time (especially due to always-on social media), he might have done me a favor.