AOL closes its dial up internet service | Hacker News Reader

AOL closes its dial up internet service

ispreview.co.uk

160 pointssimonjgreen88 comments

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How fitting that it ends with September, whether that's September 30th, 2025 or September 11718th, 1993.

Eternal September is repeating itself.

Nice Eternal September reference:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...

I didn’t realize Billie Joe Armstrong was such a big Usenet fan, but the song makes more sense now

Internet innocence is now truly in the past.

Discussion (177 points, 2 days ago, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369

There was a mention of EarthLink in that thread. They still surprisingly have a very large office building in Atlanta.

They've also recently discontinued dialup.

I guess they’re only commercial, right? I’ve tried to get them at every place I’ve lived in Atl and they’ve never been available. A lot of places you don’t even get to choose between Comcast/at$t - it’s one or the other.

I'm just happy to be in the Google fiber service area

Dial up was a painful period, sitting in school Monday-Friday thinking about what I'm going to surf in the weekend because that was the only time it was available for the package my parents had in 1998/1999 here in UK. Counting down the hours on Friday evening until it hits 12:00am.

Yeah. I think you got 6 hours a month (or something). One other aspect I didn’t like was when using and my hosemates picked up the phone I’d get disconnected, they’d be annoyed.

Similar experience but I think it made me value more my time online. That felt better. Now I'm online all the time!

interesting, because somewhere around the time that i was able to use dialup i learned to value how i spend my time. i don't know if it had anything to do with limited dialup time. however now limited online time causes more problems because it causes me to prioritize unimportant online activities, whereas when i have unlimited online access, it is easier to prioritize important activities because i can always do the online stuff later.

I first got on with Demon in '93. I remember a £1000 phone bill and a lot of trouble.

I'd love to know what AOL's dial-up MAU for July 2025 was. I still remember when the first consumer v.56 modems came out. They were expensive but it felt so fast. We were living in the future.

56k v.90/v.92

My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.

Back in the day, I definitely knew about and correctly used the term v.90. Believe it or not, this wasn't a case of being wrong when I was young but current day brain slip - because I'm no longer all that young!

Me too. I had a grandparent with AOL dial up until about 5 years ago. I was shocked when I visited her house and realized it.

My understanding years ago was that the service was surviving off of people who thought they still needed the service to access the internet even if they had broadband or kept paying for it even if they weren’t using it. Not sure if that is true or was just speculation.

Sometimes an entertaining lie is better than a boring truth.

They definitely made more than a little money from this. For example, my ex–mother-in-law kept paying for AOL dial-up after she was already paying for AT&T DSL, thinking that was the only way she could keep using AOL. And yes, she would still log in through the AOL browser.

Fear not HN: https://sdf.org/?dialup

I love SDF. It’s been a reliable friend for over 20 years. I encourage everyone on HN to support them.

I’m amazed to learn this still existed in 2025.

It was awful having to use AOL dialup in the UK. My parents used it (it was one of the few ISPs with freephone) so I was stuck with it. The problem was AOL routed all traffic through Virginia. For someone in the UK that meant a minimum of ~130ms ping, ruining online games and making everything super slow

130ms ping with dialup was actually quite low. I suffered far higher with my dialup and it was a local isp.

For games I would have done awful things for a ping that low on dial-up. More typical for me was over 200ms. I did everything I could to tweak MTU and modem settings but could never break the 200ms barrier (that I remember).

What? No Freeserve?

Freeserve was free to buy, but you paid for it with the 0845 number (like with a lot of other ISPs in the late 90s) you had to dial.

Routing through virginia persisted for a lot of ISPs well into the broadband days. Whatever could be the reason for that...

I wouldn't do that. What if the swishy sounds of modems come back in fashion like vinyl players did.

I’ve got the sound as my ring tone. But my phone is usually on silent so I rarely get to hear it.

"You've got mail!.......It's not spam!"

RIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.

This seems appropriate to link:

https://www.dialupsound.com/

That’s my ringtone, it cuts through all noise.

{s goodbye

What's going on everyone? +++ATH0

ATS12=255!

I thought it was ATS2=255?

Either way, the memories!

S2 changes the escape character (from + to 0xFF)

S12 changes the escape sequence delay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_AT_command_set#Modem_S_r...

What does this one mean? :p

It stops +++ATH0 in a IP packet (such as in a ping request, web page, etc) hanging up the modem by requiring a delay between the escape sequence (+++) and the ATH0 command.

Basically, it makes it so you don't get disconnected if someone tricks you into typing "+++ATH0"

a/s/l?

I tell my kids not to share shit with anyone now. It's hilarious to me that it was literally the first thing you did when I was their age.

Simpler times, I guess?

I just owned you all with Methodus Toolz!!1

I'm loading up my 1IM punter now

There's a great podcast about the old hacks and warez for AOL that interviews the developers, hackers, and AOL employees from that era: https://aolunderground.com/

This is great! Thank you!

Edit: 39 episodes wtf

Landfills all over the world rejoice

Dial up was a huge cash cow because of the remaining subscribers who never cancelled, likely because they forgot or gave up trying, and AOL made it famously hard to do so.

I knew a family that exploited how hard it was to cancel by attempting to cancel every month and getting another free month. iirc, they did this for years until broadband was available.

Did they still send AOL CDs to anyone in the recent times?

That would be crazy given that having a CD drive hasn't been standard on new laptops for like a decade— Apple's last portable computer with an optical drive was 2016.

According to ChatGPT, the final AOL free trial CDs were in 2006.

You would think dial up was dead already for a long time too, but apparently it wasn't.

The elderly and maybe the very rural. I have a tough time thinking there is anyone rural enough who would not go for satellite internet though. Satellite TV is pretty standard in the country.

I wonder how usable (probably pretty slow) dialup would be at this point. Somewhat of a comment of bloated web pages but also the reality.

Probably only good for email at this point and I think for some that's fine.

Yeah, but I expect many of those people just use smartphones.

I think its just pricepoint. Dial up was like $20 or $25 a month. If someone cares so little about modern internet to be fine with dial up speeds, they don't want to spend the money for satellite internet plus the dish and installation costs.

Dial up bandwidth is of course bad, but how is latency in dial up vs satellite? Geosync orbit satellite latency is abysmal, unless you are talking about low orbit.

LEO isn't great if you're surrounded by trees, unfortunately.

I know a lot of people that were previously unhappy with their old ISP, went to LEO, and then returned to their old ISP within 1-3 months.

How much would it be to mass manufacture and mail CDs these days?

Feels like it would be a fun marketing gag.

Yeah if anything you could print a qr code on it for people to download the content directly. Probably $1-$2 per disc.

Perhaps some type of retro futuristic nostalgia millennial gag.

That's actually a pretty genius idea if one were promoting a tech product with retro vibes and mailing to journalists/media. The main messaging would just be the color printing on the disc and sleeve as few would have a CD-ROM drive handy to play it, but those that do would love it if you put something cool on the disc (maybe a short Myst-like adventure with a product tie-in).

I still have a SATA CD/BD-ROM drive in my main PC system under the desk, not because I need or use it much but because the system is in an older tower PC case on wheels that I keep putting new mobos in because it's high-quality, flexible, roomy, quiet and has a ton of slide-out media bays. The CD-ROM has just stayed installed in the case as new mobos get installed and there's always extra SATA ports to plug it into.

I'm just waiting for the day some TikTok trend of people using CDs again hits and it will drive a wave of kids buying CD-ROM drives to get in on it.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv69C2Laj9Q

All the clips: https://youtu.be/dFuUCpBbbHw?si=5RBStf1u1zPJLrKu

While reading this headline, I heard a modem connection tone. Top that, AI.

I wonder how many people are laid off in this shut down.

I was recently wondering if that was still running.

I wonder how many people are still actively using dialup and why. Frankly I cannot think of a single usecase.

The thing is dial-up was transmitting data via sound. It would be kind of interesting if that ever made a comeback for encryption purposes. Maybe not exactly through wires and modem, but I could see a universe where messages are sent via videos that can only be decoded by certain people that are recording the audio.

I don't know why we would do that though. Maybe someone else can riff off this idea.

Maybe during electronic countermeasures? Only way to transmit information is through sound when the EM bandwidth is being disrupted.

from the last thread, there are areas that had phone lines but never DSL or cable, so probably that and legacy customers using the other aol services

I remember seeing graffiti with DNS servers to get around DNS based redirects affecting social media sites.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/212bmf/turks_gra... | https://archive.is/0LY26

I also remember hearing about dial-up access being used during the internet shutdown in Egypt, but I don’t know how widespread that info was distributed or used within the country at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Egypt

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/1/25/arab-spring-ann... | https://archive.is/W2Tqa

Those are legitimate use cases but that was also ~15 years ago. The wiki that is referenced in the article sounds interesting but I don’t know much about this group or its motivations, but here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecomix

https://archive.ph/2012.07.16-043637/http://werebuild.teleco...

i got my start being a little shit on progs (literally, the channel was called progs)-- i will never forget those retards helping me in vb6 when my dll would break some ocx file here or there.

the most popular prog, was of course, rampage toolz 2.0 made by oogle but random independents like me could make a cool punter or ascii generator. i copied lots of other peoples' ideas and put them into one prog, with a minimalist design which was revolutionary in the year 2000 or whatever it was and called it cyanide tools.

in fact there were even chatbots back then, believe it or not

I wonder if anyone was still scrounging for copies of Computer World to get another free trial CD

My impression of AOL was mixed.

I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.

On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.

* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s

AIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol but there may have been a way to bridge it with XMPP.

Before OSCAR there was TOC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOC_protocol

I was under the impression that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN all used XMPP. It seems that AIM added support for it in 2008, but Adium (and the other multi-chat clients) were just doing some magic to make it work seamlessly.

And Trillian.

I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.

Definitely not. AIM, YIM, and MSN all used their own proprietary protocols, and multi-client messengers like Adium contained implementations of those protocols. There was no messaging between services (except AIM <-> ICQ), and some of the services supported features the others didn't.

Microsoft figured out AIM and was able to cross message until they updated and broke it. I think that happened a few times

Sure there wasn't messaging between systems, but the point was I had friends on AIM, YIM, and MSN and I could use one program (with three accounts signed in) to message them all and not have to think about it. Adium would just aggregate them together, so I'd see "FirstName LastName" and it would message from the right service.

But modern chat apps like FB Messenger, Google Chat (if it still exists?), etc. managed to successfully break all that, never worked reliably in Adium or Pidgin (if at all).

It’s the opposite, the web was the new disruptor and AOL served everyone AOL as a pre-web online service, which continued to be used by their legacy users for many years.

Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.

There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.

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