Until high school, my family lived in a small rural town in central Illinois. About two and a half hours south of Chicago and forty-five minutes west of Champaign-Urbana—the home of the University of Illinois. In 1993, Chambana was also the birthplace of one of the first web browsers: NCSA Mosaic. Mosaic would go on to become Netscape and then, eventually, Firefox. This was all long before Marc Andreessen became a Bond villain.

I was in middle school during that first electric stretch of the internet. We always had Macs in the house. Movies like Hackers and The Net ran constantly on cable. I was ready—emotionally, spiritually, hormonally—to put on rollerblades and start hacking the planet.

But I couldn’t. Not yet.

Internet access in Mt. Pulaski didn’t really exist unless you were willing to pay long-distance charges and dial into AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe. Occasionally my parents allowed it, but those sessions were short and unsatisfying. It didn’t feel like the real internet. It felt like peeking through a locked door.

What we did have were magazines. Lots of them. MacUser and Macworld, especially. Those covers are burned into my brain. Without access to the actual web, those magazines became my portal to it.

Sometime between 1994 and 1996, I was flipping through MacUser when I noticed a small ad in the back, tucked into the “Adult” classifieds. In a plain black box it read: FREE Internet. Beneath it was a phone number: 1-217-792-2PPP.

That number stopped me cold.

217-792 was my town. Population 2,000. Middle of nowhere.

If you grew up then, you memorized phone numbers. That prefix is still burned into my brain. And here it was, printed in a national magazine, quietly offering the thing I wanted most in the world. It felt like finding a golden ticket in a candy bar.

The ad said, “All you pay for is the call.” Which, for me, meant I paid nothing at all.

I clipped it out—carefully removing any evidence that it came from the “Adult” section, which would have ended the experiment immediately as far as my parents were concerned. I plugged in our sluggish fax modem, fumbled through MacPPP or ConfigPPP or FreePPP (the utilities you used to dial and connect) and eventually heard the sweet, grinding handshake of connection. I created my first email address. I loaded my first web page. Slowly. Painfully. Wonderfully.

I was on the real internet.

The company behind it was called Slip Net. There’s almost no trace of it now. It seems to have made its money through those same classified ads, alongside things like “Sexy Modem: The Ultimate BBS.” One of the few remaining breadcrumbs is a mention in TidBITS. They note in the, "Free Service Providers" section, "SLIPNET (shell,slip,ppp) modem -> 217 792 2777 info@slip.net".

TidBITS also played a pretty huge role in getting me online. I bought the famous big yellow book, "Internet Starter Kit" that came with a floppy disc. It taught me how to use the included utilities like FreePPP or ConfigPPP to connect.

From there I wandered. Gopher servers. FTP archives. Tiny text files pulled from distant universities. Later, Hotline servers, trading low-resolution videos that took hours to download. It all felt vast and secret and impossibly alive.

A few years later, my family moved to a bigger city. DSL arrived. Then broadband. The web exploded. Being online stopped feeling like a privilege and started feeling like oxygen. And eventually, like something closer to being in a stranglehold.

Sometimes I think about how strange it is that there was ever a moment when you had to earn access to the internet. When it felt like discovering a hidden room in the world. When it promised possibility more than surveillance or exhaustion.

And no, I never did end up rollerblading through New York City while hacking the planet. But for a brief moment in the mid-90s, it felt like I might.

If anyone reading this knows why a San Francisco–based ISP had servers sitting in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois, I’d love to hear it. It still makes no sense to me thirty years later.

A few years ago, I tracked down old copies of those magazines on eBay and framed the ad as a reminder of when the internet felt young and strange and full of promise.

If you’re curious, Archive.org has scans of some magazines that feature the ads:

MacUser, September 1994

MacUser, January 1996