Eli5 In the days of dial up internet how would large organisations (or even homes with more than 1 computer) enable multiple computers to use the internet at once
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Local area network.
You have one computer acting as the server, and other computers connect into that.
When I started working in the 90s it was common for people to have email constantly connected, but only one or two computers have permanent internet access.
I’m not sure about organisations but homes could have multiple phone lines coming in. But that was only for rich people.
The short answer is with multiple phone lines.
Don’t know how intuitive this is to someone too young to really know what a phone line is but a house could have more than one.
In general, a house usually only had one line for a computer. The internet was just… not that interesting at the time. It was slow and there wasn’t much on it. People simply weren’t online all the time until we’ll after broadband.
In homes, you could pay for computer only lines (basically another phone line, or multiple) but if it was only the single line, picking up another phone while online would usually ruin whatever you were doing at that time
Before “NAT routers” (what most home users call routers) exist, there were proxy servers. You may hear them as a nefarious thing hackers want to install on your PC, but they are useful in general.
One device was given an internet connection – presumably dial-up – and ran a basic internet sharing program which was this proxy. You still had a LAN like you do in your home/business now – slower, not wireless, but the basic building blocks are there – and this dialup machine was part of it. PCs on the LAN could connect to the dial-up machine, name the URL it wanted, and the proxy would download it on your behalf and forward it to you.
“LAN” may also be too strong a word. PC-to-PC connections using something like a serial port is possible. PCs back then had serial ports, and if you didn’t need them for anything else, they were still as fast as dialup and so could easily keep up.
Now, if an organization was really big and rich, you could get an internet connection faster than dialup and even connect to the internet by a real router. Now it looks more like the setup you have at home, just with more expensive, more industrial equipment.
You can still find “Proxy” settings in the network options of some programs, including most web browsers. And you can still find programs that can make use of them. If you use Putty for SSH access, you may be able to use it as a proxy service.
I don’t know about offices, but for home use, you just didn’t use two computers online at once. There may have been homes with multiple phone lines to enable something like this, but keep in mind that the role of computers and the internet just wasn’t as prominent as it is now. A house may have only had one computer and just connecting to the internet was a huge process, so it wasn’t done nearly as often as it is now.
Back in the days of dial up I didn’t know *anyone* with more than one computer in their home. We did have two phone lines into our house though, one was for the computer.
Most homes only had 1 computer that could get online; if you needed multiple computers online then your options were either have a separate phone connection for the other computer or share the internet connection through a local area network. large companies that needed to be online didn’t use dialup; they used expensive connections like ISDN or T1 which were faster than dialup but very expensive.
T1 and T3 lines back in the day. Universities etc used them bcuz they allowed much more bandwidth.
There were office phone systems which allowed computers to connect from a desk to a central system in the office – and that system could connect out. Often, the desktop system was just a terminal – a keyboard and a monitor which just displayed what was coming from the central system. If you had more terminals than connections to the central system, you could be locked out until someone logged out and freed up a slot.
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