This may not really count as retro as it only dates back to 1998, but in the history of the World Wide Web that’s actually about half its life ago, so I’m including this.

Back in 1998 web access was slow and still quite expensive. The maximum speed we could get (thanks to BT being slow on the up take) was 28.8 kbps and to access the net you’d have to pay around £10 a month to an ISP and, unlike in the US and Canada, a local rate call (around 1p per minute at weekends and as much as 7p during the day).

As a 16 year old with a weekend job this put the internet out of reach for me, particularly as I had no way of paying a monthly contract.

Then came the X-Stream Network.

X-Stream was a Canadian company that revolutionised internet access in the UK. They made it free. In return for having an advert bar take up the top portion of your screen, the X-Stream Network gave you access for free. You still had to pay the call for every minute you were online, but no longer did you have to pay a monthly subscription as with conventional ISPs.

Initially access outside of the big cities was on a national rate number. This meant around 3p per minute in the evening and weekends and quite a lot more during the day. But I was at college during the day, so that was OK. Importantly, because the only cost was the phone call, I was able to sign up and get online.

After a year or so they provided a local rate number, bringing the cost down to about 1/3 of what it had been, and then they even offered 0800 number access on certain days and after midnight on weeknights – if you had the patience to keep redialing.

Actually, a quirk of my modem lead to it blacklisting any numbers that it failed to connect to after a certain number of attempts (thanks dynamode!) which in turn lead to me experimenting with changing the region on the drivers, eventually discovering that setting it to Australian made it dial slower but eliminated the blacklisting.

X-Stream never got the press that later companies such as Freeserve got and they were eventually bought up by Tiscali. The service was criticised by some for being slow, but for me it meant I could join the online world and buy books from Amazon, DVD’s from CD-WOW and sign up for pointless newsletter after pointless newsletter.

So – here’s to the X-Stream Network! Forgotten ambassadors to the internet in the UK!