ABSTRACT
It was at about this time that I signed up for my first network account at home: in those days, the main choice seemed to be CompuServe or . . . CompuServe. Even the giant of online connectivity, AOL, was not readily available in Europe in the early 1990s and, although the Internet Service Provider (ISP), Demon, had recently started in business, it was not particularly well known. (Demon was my first ISP a couple of years later, involving the rather painful task of having to configure the modem and protocol settings manually before connection could take place.) Indeed, the Web was generally less useful for finding information than proprietary services such as CompuServe, which also had a robust financial model that provided three hours’ free access for £10 and then charged users an hourly rate plus phone charges. In the first couple of months I happily chatted, joined forums and even explored a few web sites using my 14.4 kilobits per second modem; then I received my credit card and phone bills and was more circumspect about my home usage for the next six years or so.
