That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.

When I ran an ISP or two back in the dialup days, we advertised unlimited, but we didn't mean anything with that word, it was just what every other ISP also used in their marketing, we were just following along. The same is true today with Cellphones and ISP's, they ALL offer "unlimited", but they all have different interpretations of that word. As far as I can tell, none of the employees understand what "unlimited" means either.

Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".

If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.

Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.

Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.

Different times for sure!