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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In the old days a home would have one desktop computer connected to the internet.
Laptops were not so common then.
In offices you would have one (or two) main computers permanently connected to the internet, and then many other smaller computers connected by LAN cables (Local Area Network cables).
It was much harder to set up conputers for internet those days. Nowadays it’s so easy.
Leased lines with ISDN.
Leased lines were always on, so you were connected to the ISP around the clock. ISDN was an early broadband, or faster than dial up speeds… But not by much.
This is what we did for a small web business in the mid nineties. It was a big upgrade over dialup, but the costs were eye watering. I recall the setup being £3k (UK) then several hundred per month
Organizations that actually used the Internet for their business weren’t on dial-up. They had a permanent connection to the Internet, something like ISDN on a small-scale or a T1 line for a larger organization.
Organizations that did have dial-up were basically organizations that weren’t high-tech yet. They probably did everything by phone and on paper. Accessing the Internet was just something on the side, not the main way they contacted customers or other businesses.
For home, most people just had one home computer. Computers were expensive and they weren’t portable. It was unusual for there to be more than one computer in a home. In the rare case there was, only one would be online at a time, or you’d just get two phone lines.
Large organizations usually used a sort of “bundled line”
At home, you’d have a single PC using a single, analog phone line that could carry 56k
For business customers, you could get digital lines that could carry 64k.
You could buy bundles of business lines. The most common was the T-1. A T-1 is 24 digital lines, which tops out at 1.54 mb. (64k x 24 lines)
I say tops out because usually we split these between voice and data. So you’d use say 12 lines for your phone system and 12 for Internet, which would get you 768k Internet.
In the mid 90s you could run a really big office on 768k. To give you an idea how simple websites were in the 90s, the Dole/Kemp96 website is still live. That thing was cutting edge.
For business, your T-1 was always on and plugged into a router or proxy of some sort.
Multiple home machines online just wasn’t a thing.
Something to understand is that there is the internet “backbone” and then there’s the “last mile”. There’s a bunch of things in between the backbone and the last mile, but let’s focus on the 2 ends of it.
The internet backbone is what connects the internet together. From your city to the next city over. From one country to the next. The undersea fiber networks are a part of this. Then there’s the last mile. This is what you interact with. Your home or office to your ISP. That’s what dial up was back then. And it quickly evolved to DSL, cable internet, and now direct fiber.
Your ISP is one of the layers in the middle. Your ISP might buy access to the internet backbone through an ISP for ISPs, or they may actually own a part of the backbone. There are a lot of ways this can work out, it’s kind of like the cell phone industry where you got the tower owners (AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile) and the resellers like Tracfone or Google Fi.
Generally speaking, a company with something like their own servers or a giant office building can buy a connection from someone that owns a part of the internet backbone. They would physically lay a copper or fiber line and would have access to substantially faster internet than last mile consumers. But it’s obviously expensive. Fiber tech has been commercially available since the 80’s, but has dropped substantially in price since then. As prices dropped, they became the preferred choice. Up through maybe the mid-00’s copper like T1 connections were common for this use but they’re laughably slow compared to modern connections (<10mbit symmetrical up/down).
For big offices, it was much the same as now. You had a router which would direct a single Internet connection to multiple computers. It was just wired rather than WiFi. If it was important enough you would also have a broadband connection rather than dial-up. These were available, but were high end special products – they would take months to install and cost $thousands per month.
For small offices, you would just have a phone line for each computer, or if data needs were very low, then you might have a router with a dial up modem on it.
Sometimes, you would have one computer connected to internet, but certain apps like email could be routed through that one computer. This way all computers could get email but only 1 could access Web sites.
Fnally,there was router software available. It eventually became integrated into things like Windows. This meant even for a home with 2 PCs, you would dial up the Internet on one and load the router software, and then both PCs would have access.
Old dial up didn’t require a router to be used. Most people just plugged there computer directly into the wall jack. You could put a router in and connect multiple devices to it, just keep in mind there wasn’t any wireless.
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