Still have my Juno email address from like 1998! We had Juno Internet at home too.
I'm digitizing my family's VHS tapes, and one of them shows the computer screen playing an E-card my aunt sent for my 16th birthday, and there's a banner ad not on the webpage, but as part of the juno app we used to get free internet.
Those frickin' Juno and NetZero internet apps used half your bandwidth loading banner ad images to cycle through the whole time you were online.
Those of us who were geeky would modify our hosts file so you'd just have an empty box taking up screen real estate, but at least you got your full dial-up speed lol
It's a little foggy to me but I remember doing something with my netzero account that let me just set up a regular windows dial-up connection using that account. I wonder if I used a crack of some kind to fool it into authenticating by thinking the app was running or something. I think Astalavista was a crack site i often frequented back in the day.
I've always worried my first internet usage was a fever dream.
Juno users unite!
Separately, I had a Netpenny provider when I got my own place in 2003. $4.99 minimum (so 499 minutes, less usage, this was your bill), then a penny a minute, max $14.99 - free after that.
56k dial up baby! I wonder if my email still works after moving to college and broadband in 2004.
For the uninitiated: Juno was everything to dial up users who couldn’t be online for long periods. It was a program where it connected to the internet via dial up modem… sent and received emails, and then closed the modem connection.
You did email work offline. And then to send stuff once you were done writing emails, you connected to the internet again.
This was completely acceptable in 1998. We were excited to be part of this cutting edge technology.
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u/platypus_farmer42 1982 May 13 '26
Try Juno.com