I mean, the act of people scalping stuff has existed before the digital age. Even a century ago: scalpers would pay a third party to hold a spot in line on purchasing concert or theater tickets to resell at a higher price since the internet didn’t exist back then. Like, in the 90s: scalpers showed up in person (paying someone to hold the spot for you whilst in line) for acquisition of the product, that’s how they’ve done it.

At the time, pre-orders for an upcoming console or game were done in store (you physically went there placing an order after seeing an ad on TV or a magazine). But, how common were scalpers during that era? It would be like a group of scalpers pretending not to know each other or split into smaller groups heading to different retailers on buying the same product whilst playing as another customer.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    The closest things we had back then was USENET (which required you to already have a connection to a provider that hosted a server) and BBS’s (which required you to dial in to connect to a local server, which proabably did not have its own USENET connection). I suppose there was also Compuserve, and QuantumLink/AOL, but they were metered dial-in providers, and when they finally connected to USENET, they ruined it.

    There was no concept of a device that was always connected to the Internet in the 80s for most users. Most home computers were islands. Maybe if you were on a University campus you might have access to a computer with that permanent wired connection, but that was about it.

    My kids have grown up in a world where everyone is connected, all the time. We’ll see what they do with it.

    • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
      2·
      7 hours ago

      There was no concept of a device that was always connected to the Internet in the 80s for most users.

      I knew people who used “finger” on unix like systems for same purpose as people use a “status” today (ok without pictures because of low bandwidth)