I "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me.
I "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me.
I got a 300 baud modem right around the same time. There were a few local BBSs that ran meetups, scavenger hunts, warez parties and the like. I got to know a bunch of the regulars from the area. Pretty cool time.
I think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach.
What about when you want to find hot singles in your area?
Jokes aside, probably 10-20% of my browsing is related to local things, up to the country scale. From finding local restaurants or businesses, to finding about relevant laws or regulations, news, etc. That's not negligible.
Fair point, but those information sources and those things were not connected to a local internet.
Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)
BBS were a little off-tangent if you were actually using the internet itself, which I was (or least, I was pretty shortly after a few months on JANET (UK) and Bitnet (US & Israel).