AOL to discontinue dial-up internet(nytimes.com) |
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet(nytimes.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.
Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...
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).
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.
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
Does anyone know?
If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
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
block in on em1 probability 20%
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.
In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
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.
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)
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.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
"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
I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
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.
Yeah it largely just worked.
Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
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.
Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
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.
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.)
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.
"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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)
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.
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.
I got DSL a few weeks later.
Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.
Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.
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.
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.
OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
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.
You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
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 msHonestly, 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.
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.
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.