AOL to discontinue dial-up internet | Hacker News Reader

AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

228 pointssituationista237 comments

Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat.

My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached.

Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.

Hacker News still worked of course.

Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around.

The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text.

The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.

A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.

Heh. I know someone who uses VoIP via geostationary satellite internet connection. He tried Starlink as an upgrade, however, the 100W continuous power draw was a dealbreaker with his off-grid solar setup. This is off-grid enough not to have cell coverage.

Anyway talking with him on the phone you pretty much have to use a "over" / "over and out" kind of protocol because of the long latency.

The starlink mini is in the 20w (idle) to 40w (active) range if that might help.

I grew up in a town that did not get broadband internet access until 2017. Before that people had little to no high-speed internet service other than the town library (and they would park or sit outside the library to use the wifi when it was closed). They would also use cell phone data plans.

I feel like finding out a house you bought doesn't actually have internet after the fact makes it worthless in the modern world and should be a valid reason to reverse the purchase.

It should be part of the buyers due diligence. No sale reversal.

Is there a way to truly do due diligence on that front? Some independent authority that will guarantee available connectivity with a bond or something? You certainly cannot trust the ISPs. Even if their salespeople don't lie to you out of greed, poor tooling, or incompetence, unless there's a working connection already, you run the risk of "sure, you're in our footprint, but we can't physically connect you because reasons" at installation time.

The closest I can think of off the top of my head is requiring a working (and testable) fiber connection before signing, and refuse to close if there isn't one. I have no idea how that would impact trying to buy a home today.

A qualified surveyor should be able to tell you if a fibre line is connected to your home.

Here in the UK at least companies are not allowed to lie about which houses can and cant get service, and there is a regulatory body (ofcom) that regulates this and other telecommunications service aspects.

Just to add (cant edit). They also regulate speed and can receive fines for over promising and under delivering. As a consumer i can raise this with the ombudsman to force action or remediation.

To be fair when you are put on the 128kbps penalty box with the cell provider they also de-prioritize your traffic to the very very bottom of the queue so it's almost impossible to even get the 128kbps, and if the network is busy at all you often get nothing.

but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example. Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.

> Email is always an option

Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.

Ya man, my father (a grandfather) moved here from Poland, not speaking the language with $200, bought a house within 3 years in California, had a successful career in construction management building amazing buildings you might currently be sitting in.... How could he ever figure out Outlook, that takes real concentration and determination reserved only for no name state school cs grads under 40!

The point is mindset. Someone willing to move not just across countries but continents will have it far easier to deal with computers and new technology in general than someone "set in their ways".

Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.

Grandmothers have been computing for long enough to know what an email client is. It is the first thing we setup on my grandma's intel 486 computer (at a time we were all using pentium II and above) when she got dial up.

This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.

We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.

I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.

> YouTube works admirably well.

This is what really kills me. I spent a lot of time in 2020 on a 4G connection throttled to 384 Kbps. Video calls? Fine (once you gave it a few seconds to notice the poor throughput and readjust its target bitrate). Most of the web? Not fine. Crazy reversal from the dial-up days when pushing even an audio call over the connection was difficult, and real-time video was a pipe dream that sunk more than one overly-enthusiastic would-be media streaming companies.

And the only reason she doesn’t have access to higher bandwidth is because rural America and conservatives consistently vote for politicians who cut funding for it….

Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.

I see what you're getting at, but that doesn't explain bandwidth deserts in parts of rural California. They might have local conservative representatives, but the state leadership is obviously not conservative.

The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".

Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.

Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.

There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make a name for themselves, and nothing will really stop people from wanting to do that. If your frustration is people using a certain technology simply for the sake of it being new, you should be focused on convincing them that isn't necessary to make good/useful tech and make a name for themselves, rather than insulting them for having general ambition.

"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.

Stuff like camera live streams are possible even without HTML. I remember one that used an infinitely-loading GIF. You'd just visit the GIF file directly and it would show you the livestream. It was awesome.

multipart/x-mixed-replace was (and still is?) how IP cameras showed their stream.

> Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out.

For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].

IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...

> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway)

The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.

Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.

I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.

Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.

Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.

There's https://ddg.gg if you don't mind using duckduckgo

Yes, and Firefox Mobile falls into it by default.

> The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out.

Can you share any info on how to access it?

Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."

Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."

After several tries, I managed to click the blue "here" before it disappeared. It took me to a help page that does not offer basic HTML, namely:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?authuser=0&visi...

So if the basic HTML mode is still buried in there somewhere, how do you get to it, if only for nostalgia's sake?

Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?

I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:

- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome

- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.

I think main use is email and instant messaging providing you don't autoload medias.

A surprising number of sites still work without js. CNN even, as an example.

Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.

Or just use http://lite.cnn.com/en. It's great that they still support a "text" version.

> GMail

She can access her GMail account using a mail client like Thunderbird (which is deteriorating, but works), or any one of many other alternatives:

https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/top-free-open-source-email-c...

> Facebook

I could recommend avoiding that particular tar-pit, but if your mom is there, maybe try:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+lite+desktop&ia=web

that's apparently a lighter-weight client, though I can't vouch for it.

> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second

Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.

On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds.

I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)

I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but worked. Explaining high bills was fun.

You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.

Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.

Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...

Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.

My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).

A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.

I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there worked best.

IIRC connecting to the PSTN the best you would ever see was 48kbps, at least in the states, although if you were transferring uncompressed data in the clear sometimes the modem could compress it for you on the fly to get more data on the wire. In practice though big files tended to be compressed already so you rarely saw much benefit from that. You needed some sort of closed phone network that didn't compress the voice channel the way the phone company did in order for the modems to negotiate up to the max.

Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.

A decade after they went off the market I came across one still in the shrink wrap and gag gifted it to a couple of friends. Neither one wanted it for some reason. "Oh, gee, thanks". LOL!

Yep. And nothing on the packaging to tell you this.

Later on, there were modems that required a CPU with MMX instructions. Dealt with that a lot when I ran my short-lived computer shop.

I made it a policy in '97 to only buy external modems.

A friend of mine replaced the twisted pair from where it entered his house, to his modem with a piece of coax. He claimed it helped.

With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.

Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.

I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.

Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.

True, latency was much better via ISDN. Also we had channel bundling in Germany: 2 x 64 kbit/s. Shared via 10 Mbit/s LAN of course. The hub was a 19 inch beast with fans. Absolutely worked.

my earliest recollection was 14.4 then came 28.8 then 33.3 and finally 56kbps. In college, mide-late 90s, if we wanted Inet access from our dorm we had to use dial-up but if we went to the lab we could get on the T1 (1.5mbps) which i think was shared with the whole campus. iirc my campus connected to UT-Austin and then they had a T3 (45mbps) to the Internet. ..something like that

Heh, some great memories using the T1 line at the school. In the wild west days we Napster'ed at extreme speeds before someone narked us out 8-)

My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"), that might be the most 1990s thing I own.

We intercepted the unencrypted microwave link between campuses, and basked in full ISDN glory.

They never did figure out where all their bandwidth was going, although the boarding house festooned with cat4 was suspicious. They came and snipped some more conspicuous cables, which were of course immediately spliced back together.

They tried to shut the internet down overnight in response, but their DNS level block was a mere roadbump, and in the end they got another ISDN line… which was immediately put to use in the downstairs kitchen VCD factory. Put the Hong Kong kids out of business, as with them you’d have to wait until next term, with us you got your warez tomorrow, with a fried breakfast.

I remember getting 5.2 KB/s downloading the Worms 2 demo from Tucows and could practically feel the wind in my hair screaming down the information superhighway...

I remember spending ONE WEEK downloading windows 98. Younger generations will never know the fun of click-and-wait and the thrill of jpgs slowly loading.

I remember spending 4 hours downloading the GTA 2 demo on PC. My parents weren't happy with the phone bill later that month. But the wait was so worth it.

Yeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.

Waited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.

I remember downloading Debian 3.0 ISO images over what I think might have been ISDN. I didn't know you didn't need all six or seven CDs in order to install.

(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)

I remember downloading the last 2 episodes of Star Trek Voyager of of an FTP server through Windows XP's Explorer. 2 WMV files of 50 megabytes each. Took all night. If a single issue had happened I would have had to start the download all over, but it worked out fine!

I got DSL a few weeks later.

I was a Slackware guy but I heard good things about Debian. So I tied up our 33.6K modem for three days downloading an ISO. My roommates were pissed but I owned the line.

Then I went to install it and the ISO was corrupted. I never got to try Debian until I joined the Air Force and downloaded it at work.

A buddy of mine was the reason quotas were set on our shell accounts at our ISP. You could dial in as PPP or just as a regular serial connection to get a login on their BSDI server. He downloaded the Win98 beta to the ISP's server and would ZModem it down from there while the rest of us were sleeping.

Between that and the time I discovered "DISPLAY=<my IP>:0 xdm" worked from our shell account I'm surprised we weren't kicked off the ISP.

It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:

  33.6 kbit/s (a later addition)
  31.2 kbit/s (a later addition)
  28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it)
  26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice)
  24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this)
  21.6 kbit/s (apparently this was very common, though I don't remember seeing it)
  19.2 kbit/s
  16.8 kbit/s
  14.4 kbit/s (quite possible)
  (lower bitrates are also documented; this is all multiples of 2.4 kbit/s)

Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.

Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.

I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48 kilobits per second though never sustained.

I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).

IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL

> 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum)

"56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998 and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC

It's not a matter of what the modems were capable of, it's a matter of what the phone line would and could actually carry. Maybe it would be different in a big city, but I don't think I ever saw anybody get over 33.6 before upgrading to DSL.

33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).

I lived in a city but I got a connection at ~48k on a V.90 regularly.

It did depend on line quality, though. We had some kinds of splitters and internal cabling in the house for allowing multiple phones (and eventually the modem), and I remember that prior to some changes made to that, I only used to get up to ~40k.

Don't forget the first mass produced consumer modems were 300 baud, and yes we're ignoring the model 37 teletype at 120 baud. Then 1200 baud came soon after for a huge improvement.

Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.

I remember being SOOOO jealous of my buddy, cause their family got a 28.8 modem! (We were stuck on 16k at the time, IIRC)

That's how I remember it.

For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.

Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.

56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.

Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.

Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.

My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.

Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.

The experience of watching local LLMs produce text has a similar vibe to those old modem links. Everything old is new again.

No Courier, no carrier.

I was born in 1996, this is like a bedtime story to me. I had AOL as a kid because my family was poor, but I do not remember any of the numbers. Please post more cool stuff like this.

Modems stopped improving after 56k. I was always excited by the ability to pause the internet while another call came through but like all good things it came too late. And by that time I moved up (and likely was the last to move up).

Also, 56kbps was the MAX POSSIBLE speed. 48kbps was the maximum speed I ever remember seeing, with somewhere around 42kbps being more common. Occasionally I would connect at 36kbps, see the speed, hang up and try again.

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.

Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.

Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services

I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.

Yeah it largely just worked.

I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers?

Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.

I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.

Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm guessing Amazon is out of the question.

Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.

My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.

I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing.

Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.

It sounds like AOL won’t disclose that information and the only national survey anyone has cited doesn’t distinguish by ISP.

Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.

I also want to hear from the people who still maintain AOL in 2025!

Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the grandkids.

At this point, it would not surprise me if there was a very small but very enthusiastic community of retro computing enthusiasts with AOL accounts.

Having very older parents, what an important use case!

Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.

Fortunately, I’m able to guide my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.

I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.

For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.

They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.

Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.

What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?

lol no.

They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.

Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.

The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.

It wasn’t a browser by any modern sense of the word early on. All of the graphics were on the disk to reduce load time.

Don't forget the browser toolbar.

They predated the web browser by several years. Even once they added a browser a lot of people didn't have computers powerful enough to run them. Netscape for example needed 8MB of RAM, which was a lot in the early 90s. Plus back then the Web wasn't nearly as dominant. A lot of discussion happened on the Usenet, which AOL also provided access to much to the chagrin of the existing Usenet users. Email of course was also huge. Mostly it was expected that you would stay within the walled garden of AOL's service, using the keywords in their fat client to load topics of interest. More like a corporate version of a BBS.

And before they started sending the free CDs they would send 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone call and format away! Shipped!

I remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs are heavy, b) the headquarters aren’t even in Germany so I would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shipping heavy stuff is expensive, d) it’s easier to spread the word to everyone that they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to stop.

Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.

The floppies were actually a bounty since they were rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids, which he instead kept in his office reached for when he needed to copy that floppy.

Also: (“net.wars: The Making of an Underclass: AOL”) https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupre...

> hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was

you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.

I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.

Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.

I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail

A few years back I was pacing a marathon and toward the end it was just me and a recent college graduate. Something caused me to mention AOL and she hadn't heard of it. I mentioned CD-ROMs and she said: "you mean, like for music?". She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995? It's amazing how something that was as ubiquitous as AOL (and it was ubiquitous) can come and go in a single generation.

> She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995?

Someone born in 1995 would normally be expected to be familiar with CDs because of their parents' music collection.

(And, depending on the family, because of their use as computer media. CDs were still important in 2005 when such a person would be 10.)

She was familiar with CDs for music but not with CD-ROMs for distributing software.

I also just double-checked this with my 24 y/o daughter and much to my chagrin, she also wasn't familiar with CD-ROMs. So that lead to a conversation about CD-ROM drives, ripping music, Napster, ... all things she was unfamiliar with.

Indeed, and it kicked off a race of ISPs seeking to emulate. I probably had a dozen Blue Light (not to be confused with Blu-Ray) internet discs from K-Mart back in the day

I forgot all about blue light.

they were popular among hacker types during the free phase because they were one of the free ISPs that had an easy-to-fake dialer for a straight tcp/ip connection for nix machines.

At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.

And for people on the Internet every waking moment of their lives it's hard to explain how people got by at the insane price points those services had. AOL for example gave you 5 hours of dialup time per month. They billed by the minute. Every additional hour cost you $1. And they exploded in popularity because that was a far better price than their competitors (GEnie, Compuserv, Prodigy, etc...)

Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.

AOL keywords were the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram handle in ads before Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Lists were published in various forms, including Hypercard: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_ult-aol-keywords-stack...

I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.

To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.

It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.

My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).

Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.

Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.

I'm actually surprised that it still existed anyway.

Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point.

I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic.

Good old times.

AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.

I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.

In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE) It is $10/month for 30GB with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going over the 30GB limit.

The caveat with this is that many people on dialup are the ones who live too far from civilization to get cell coverage. The only reason they have phone service at all is government incentives in the mid 20th century.

For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).

So many pieces of the internet being discontinued. A little nostalgic but I don't really see the point in keeping dial up alive anymore.

When I was first exposed to the net, I used an email to http proxy. It was called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) and you sent a certain email address emails with requests for pages, posting to forms etc. Then walked away and came back and checked your inbox for responses. It was quirky but I did get some documentation and largish poster of Steve Vai back in the day using this which was kind of cool I guess.

I sent so many emails (first from pine and then from mutt) that I remember the email address by heart. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp

This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three later.

I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently.

I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker.

Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day.

Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

Any thoughts on using Rust, Go, or Zig?

Been tempted to try Zig. Rust made my head hurt just looking at it.

A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.

Previous discussion two days ago, 101 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369

TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet.

At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.

TIL AOL still exists

I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad

Me, too.

Me in 2002: "Wtf is this paper bill mom? You pay for email?" Me in 2007: "Mom. Just... stop"

Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!

When I worked at AOL about 10 years ago, dialup was _still_ responsible for 100% of their profits. Literally every other part of the company lost money (Mapquest, AIM, Huffington Post, their ad network, etc). They were making literally billions of dollars from it and it was like 90+% profit margin or something absurd. It was like a single server running millions of virtual modems.

I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.

I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST

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

Oh dude, I played a ton of Chex Quest back in the day. They did a really good job with implementation there. Honestly, an utterly brilliant marketing plan because to this day I still have major warm vibes for Chex brand. Wish they'd up the protein to carb ratio a bit though so I could eat it in good conscience :-)

But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter?

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...

My first modem was the 300 baud VIC Modem Commodore made for the Commodore VIC-20. It was supposed to be the first modem for under $100 which they achieved by not having those rubber cups for the receiver. Instead, it plugged directly into the wall. Years later I found out the first modems were 110 baud.

I bought the VIC Modem second hand but the only thing I could connect to was another friend who had a modem. We transferred some files but decided it was faster to drive over to his house with a disk and then drive back.

I also tried connecting to a data service listed in the yellow pages, and the modem would connect, but then I couldn't get it to do anything. The service was listed as being free but I didn't realize it was a long distance call to connect to it and that wasn't free so my parents ended up with an $80 long distance bill from my modem calls.

Then I had a 1200 baud modem Commodore made for the Commodore 64. Again, I was only able to connect with other friends who had a modem.

When I got my Amiga 2000, I set up a BBS (FidoNet 1:255/42) with a SupraModem 2400. Later they had a deal for sysops to get their new 14,400 modem. I can't remember if it was buy-one-get-one-free, or buy-one-get-one-half-price. I only had one phone line so I sold the second one to a friend who used my BBS the most. At least someone could benefit from my having 14,400.

I also remember playing Battle Chess over the modem with a friend who had a PC clone. We were playing one day and my mom called me to supper so I set Battle Chess on my Amiga to autoplay while I was eating. When I came back my friend had no idea I had left. Good laugh.

I think I had a 33,600 next and then finally a 56K before moving to a city where they were testing HFC internet which was hybrid-fibre-coax around 1997 and was 10 Mbit/s both up and down. It was screaming fast compared to dialup and I could download a CD ISO in under 20 seconds while my friend back home were still downloading ISO images via dialup. (Just did the math and it should only take 8 to 9 seconds, so I guess there was a bottleneck somewhere).

Pour one out, RIP to a real one.

In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.

My first “modem” was this fantastically beige 300-baud hand-me-down acoustic coupler from 1984: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Ac...

A family friend came round and used it to hook up my Atari ST to a local BBS. Mind-blowing. I got a brief glimpse of the future that day.

Local calls not being free, I wasn’t allowed to repeat the experiment until we signed up for MSN in 1996.

Didn’t stop younger me switching on the acoustic coupler with no computer attached and trying “communicate” with it by making “shhhh” noises into the cups :D

So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?

AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.

It's funny, many people complain that the web got way worse after smartphones became common. It's the second eternal September.

I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up?

Does anyone know?

Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.

Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.

Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.

In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.

Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb.

Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.

Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.

Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls.

Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite

Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city:

  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114 time=333689.274 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 time=332673.845 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114 time=332618.215 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114 time=331050.087 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms

5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?

You're reading it correctly. I was astonished too.

You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that.

Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.

It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know.

I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.

But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.

When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.

I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations.

I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment.

With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.

wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.

It's the Three network in the UK. I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.

When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.

No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.

You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet.

I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.

There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.

But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com

You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.

Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore.

VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.

AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.

Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.

Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.

No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.

I've done modem calls over VOIP. Any connection above 2400 is incredibly unstable for the reasons you describe.

Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.

It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i...

But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…

Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.

Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.

>I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.

Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.

software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers.

You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.

There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.

OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.

That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.

Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.

Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month for the last 30 years for.

I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they don't continue to pay for it.

Are they wrong?

Yes

As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the subscription offers other services (tech support, "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to keep access to your email address without paying the $50/month subscription.

I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I had it linked to some famous .com service that I have been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to have a live human reset the password and get back in.

I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL email address. The type of business he was in could involve old contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not lose that business.

Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.

What type of business was it? Consulting?

He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I like to think his stuff was more valuable.

There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive.

https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...

Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.

I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably priced.

What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.

I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.

Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)

A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds.

If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.

Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.

yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.

I run an openbsd firewall and was able to setup queues to limit connection speed. I mainly use it to banish iot devices to the shadow realm. (connectivity detection appears to work but it is slow enough that nothing really gets done)

If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues.

    queue base0 on em0 bandwidth 100M max 100M 
    queue full parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 100M qlimit 128 default
    queue limited  parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 1K max 1K qlimit 128
    
    match in on em1 queue limited

Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like

    block in on em1 probability 20%

But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.

I do IT stuff for a local pizza chain. They are still on an ancient Linux POS system. With dumb terminals using PS/2 keyboards with 3 rows of function keys for buttons for every pizza topping and such.

I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers.

However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.

OMG how can you do business like that, depending on a sole developer. Ever thought of cracking the software?

I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.

As much crap as AOL used to get, there's not much difference between their chat in 1996 and Teams and Slack now. And it managed to do it with 8 Mb of RAM over a 14.4k modem. Of course it didn't have video, but the group chat itself was basically the same.

In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.

Except that the AIM protocol was reverse-enginnereed and you could then use a single client (GAIM/Pidgeon, Trillian) to talk to all your friends. The protocols nowadays are so locked down that there has yet to be a decent 3rd party implementation.

Loved Trillian

The AOL chat rooms were different than AIM.

From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM.

For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.

The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got mail!". The doors opening/closing.

Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available.

Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.

I had a thought a couple of days ago about the flood of emails and notifications that we enjoy the privilege of these days and came to the conclusion that, the value of the notification has a direct relationship with he amount of effort that went into creating it and the number of recipients it's destined for.

The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero.

The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value.

An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me.

We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.

At a law office I worked in during the 90s, several of the secretaries and paralegals had AOL Instant Messenger installed on their machines for IM inside the office (and to/from people outside the office too, I'm sure). I dunno if it violated any licensing agreements, but it worked well and didn't cost the firm a penny.

Yeah, even as late as the early aughts I was using instant messaging for internal office communication.

> In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.

AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytim...

In 1997 I got a job at a college where only the college administrators had internet and it was via WinProxy and a modem on my desktop PC. They were paying for a number of ISP email addresses. They also had a static website hosted elsewhere on a pre-OSX Mac.

I was able to propose spending $1,000 on a web/email server and putting in a 56K ISDN line for a lower monthly cost. This also gave them full control over their web server to write PHP and use MySQL. It also allowed every staff member to have an email on their own domain and web access. We also put Squid proxy on the server to cache some of the web browsing. It worked well. Later when we were able to upgrade to DSL, we also added the computer lab to the internet. Fun times.

The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5 in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so much garbage.

Those dial-up sounds are pure nostalgia. It's amazing when you consider loading a .jpg used to occur gruellingly slow on dial-up, and downloading a 5mb file might take hours. Now we stream HD video without (much) hiccup even on slow fiber, cable etc.

I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)

Still available from MSN for the time being: https://get.msn.com/

The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.

Still remember when AOL cut our internet after I got spicy at 9 years old because I was mad at my cousin. Mom was very unhappy. We got internet back, but I wasnt allowed on for months. Lots of memories there.

I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.

Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.

For me it was downloading mp3 files and only letting Winamp play them on repeat as they download. At first you just got a second or two of sound, and it would add maybe a second on each play. Eventually the magic of compound interest would get you the whole song, and that was a major adrenaline rush

I remember downloading IE4 over a phone line at the inlaws. It took hours for a few MB. It was worse if I recall as I already had broadband via Road Runner back then (1998).

I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it

I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...

Imagine the final dial-up.

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