AOL will finally end 1991 dial-up Internet service that’s older than smartphones
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FSTargetDrone
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The last dial up service I used was called “SNiP.net” (Southern New Jersey internet Provider, I think) despite my living in Pennsylvania. It shut down years ago but the email address I had there is still tied to my Distrbuted.net account.
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Windows had an ISP assistant type thing in the 90s recommending things like prodigy, AOL, etc. I don’t remember the exact list.
With some creativity, we were able to get unlimited free internet.
Things were so insecure back then, nearly all the exploits involved killing the assistant after it dialed, changing DNS servers, etc. IIRC prodigy let this happen for YEARS.
That being said, I had family use AOL, but I wasn’t into it. I do still have free trial discs, however, and I miss AIM, of which I used frequently.
I didn’t even know AOL was still up. Last I read, they got bought out. I assumed the actual service was killed even before that.
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Did you have this obituary article pre-written like the New York Times does for aging celebrities? This looks way too detailed to be thrown together in a rush when the news broke!
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I was going to mention the "grandma tax". With my mother it was just easier to pay the (then) $5 rather than trying to get her to use different apps.
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Yes, my dad still has his despite dropping them years ago. What took an act of congress though was for the wife to keep her Prodigy email address. Totally worth it though. Kids these days don't even know Prodigy was big until AOL wiped them out.
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If Ars still exist, let say 3 decade later. How many still remember in this forum, sound of dialup modem?
I guess Ars can run some article about internet from late 20th century.
I guess Ars can run some article about internet from late 20th century.
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It's not the most appealing Win9x-style UI, but certainly better than most modern things.
No.
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OK, well, if you really start missing that old AOL experience, just go watch "You've Got Mail."
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And we found this just last week! (Haven't found my USB floppy disk reader yet to see if it still reads)
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macosandlinux
Ars Praefectus
What a glorious time to browse GeoCities and the curated lists of websites. It was so free of spam then.
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Time for some dumpster diving outside your local CO, though I don't know how many dialup providers actually colocated vs just having the T1/PRI brought to their own facility
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Also BBSes, which were also huge time sinks. I ended up bringing in a second phone line to my parents' house, and then a third line when I wanted to run a BBS. But the house was only wired for two, so I had to actually run a wire myself from the junction box. It was my first exposure to wiring infrastructure of any kind. Fortunately, phones were dead simple, so it was a good starting point.
I was living in San Ramon, and working at a dotcom, when Pacbell announced the first home DSL service. I ordered it that day. It was live within a week or two. Turned out my apartment was close to a phone substation, so I got the full 1.5 megabits.
Jeeze, that was transformative. It was such a huge advantage in competitive online gaming. Not because of the speed, but because of the latency. I was like four hops and maybe 15 milliseconds from MAE West (probably the first centralized peering point on the West Coast. This was critically important once upon a time, but now there are vast numbers of peering exchanges and few of them are particularly special anymore.) So, I was incredibly well connected, and it was pretty common to have ping times under 50ms on many servers. (Dialup latency was typically around 300ms.) I was one of the original Low Ping Bastards... mostly only college kids went low-ping sooner than I did.
The next big step forward was fiber Internet in Chattanooga. I remember being just blown away at getting symmetric 250MBit to my house. Where I lived. And had my own computers. That eventually got upgraded to gigabit for much less money, but it was 250Mbit that was really magic.
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shit, we used to make fun of aol, aolers, coaster cd's and all that... but in these days of crypto and LLM, is it a wonder that hearing something like this actually makes me misty-eyed?
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I can see that. My family briefly dabbled with AOL in between trying out all these "luxery cruise ship" style providers that attempted to turn the internet into a singular platform they controlled entirely. It didn't work then, but nowadays companies like "X" and Google have come much closer to managing that feat.
What I remember most at the time was being bugged when someone asked "do you have the internet?" at school, in some pedantic way, and then services like AOL managed to convince people that being online meant you had "A" username, that everyone needed THAT username to even be on the information super highway. AOL really did imprint themselves in the popular culture that deeply early on. Eternal September indeed.
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vedekhaliwell
Ars Praetorian
I worked for Microsoft for a decade. I cannot tell you how often, back in the Win9x days, we would walk people though the removal of the bastardized IE4 that AOL used, and then installl the Microsoft version. You'd groan internally if they did not have their Windows 9x CD handy. . .. .
So glad those days are over.
But I remember jumping from CompuServe, to MSN, to AOL, to Prodigy and to Earthlink using up my "free hours" on each one. Did that dance for a couple years before broadband was finally in my neighborhood.
So glad those days are over.
But I remember jumping from CompuServe, to MSN, to AOL, to Prodigy and to Earthlink using up my "free hours" on each one. Did that dance for a couple years before broadband was finally in my neighborhood.
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We moved, for what we hope is the last time, into a rural home relatively recently. Three miles away from the edge of the nearest town, a place of peace and quiet, fresh air, a few neighbours, a bit of land to grow things, a garage / workshop, and a heartwarming amount of wildlife. Tradeoffs being more biting insects, and internet service.
I had a taste of 1Gb fibre in our last place. I was spoiled. Here, it is either 1 to 3Mb "ADSL Broadband", or 4G. I made enquiries about 5G, or fibre, to be met with nebulous "under review" responses. Maybe in the next five years. Maybe. Satellite? We have rain and storms throughout the year. I'm just finishing my preparations for a potentially snowed in, heavy winter.
Now don't get me wrong, it's a trade-off I can accept, with a smile on my face. With an external antenna the 4G averages 30Mb and I swear it once touched 70Mb just to tease me. It is affordable for "unlimited" "fair" use. But it doesn't half remind me of dial up on the old 14.4Kbps sometimes because modern bandwidth demands seem so high, with so much data being required behind the scenes. Nullifying ads and tracking helps big time. Apart from the most traditional of websites we don't even get the "thrill" of line by line progress appearing on screen any more.
I feel for those who have been dependent on dial up, especially in this day and age.
Now, where did I leave my reading glasses...
I had a taste of 1Gb fibre in our last place. I was spoiled. Here, it is either 1 to 3Mb "ADSL Broadband", or 4G. I made enquiries about 5G, or fibre, to be met with nebulous "under review" responses. Maybe in the next five years. Maybe. Satellite? We have rain and storms throughout the year. I'm just finishing my preparations for a potentially snowed in, heavy winter.
Now don't get me wrong, it's a trade-off I can accept, with a smile on my face. With an external antenna the 4G averages 30Mb and I swear it once touched 70Mb just to tease me. It is affordable for "unlimited" "fair" use. But it doesn't half remind me of dial up on the old 14.4Kbps sometimes because modern bandwidth demands seem so high, with so much data being required behind the scenes. Nullifying ads and tracking helps big time. Apart from the most traditional of websites we don't even get the "thrill" of line by line progress appearing on screen any more.
I feel for those who have been dependent on dial up, especially in this day and age.
Now, where did I leave my reading glasses...
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I remember it fondly even though I got 10GbE broadband in 1998 but if you don't here you go:
View: https://youtu.be/yQ_hWS6ked8?si=fC7hSnGRBcQztwQI
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Starlink isn't the only Satellite option, just currently the best one.
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I do mail deliveries, and I'm seeing letters from the Lines Company to residents, "Your internet WILL stop working". They have fiber to the gate, and can be connected for free. Keep their land line number, and probably pay $10 less a month (for a 200mb unlimited account). So year, copper land lines are going away here*.
I expect there will be much wailing from the last hold outs when they actually pull the plug, but it's not that they weren't warned, or even asked to pay.
* Here is small town NZ
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Meh, I might have got a 14k connect from my last house. But the phone wires were cable tied to the neighbour's fence, then stapled to a tree. I wasn't online much for those years. They have fixed the phone wires, but there is a local MIFI dish in the hill above the house now when I drive past. So the new poles and wire are probably redundant.
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56 Kbps? Luxury! I go back to the days where you had to put the handset into the rubber cups. I did use 300 baud, but that really was unusably slow. It was still good for some things. I remember getting to college in 1976 and watching the moves of the ongoing world chess championship being chattered out in real time on a DECwriter. Damn, this really was the future.
Getting up to 56K on the 3 KHz voice band on telephone lines really was incredible. The 56K modems get almost 20 bits per Hertz. Take that, Shannon! It was an incredible feat, made possible by adaptive coding with DSPs. DSL got up to megabits per second on regular phones lines, but only with special modems on each end of the physical wire.
AOL itself was a betrayal of the Internet's philosophy. They wanted to seize all the creativity displayed by its users for itself, and prevent anyone from going outside it. That failed in the long run, like all other enshittification schemes. Facebook is failing now for the same reason. We'll see if Google's zero-click AI-scraping scheme fails too.
Getting up to 56K on the 3 KHz voice band on telephone lines really was incredible. The 56K modems get almost 20 bits per Hertz. Take that, Shannon! It was an incredible feat, made possible by adaptive coding with DSPs. DSL got up to megabits per second on regular phones lines, but only with special modems on each end of the physical wire.
AOL itself was a betrayal of the Internet's philosophy. They wanted to seize all the creativity displayed by its users for itself, and prevent anyone from going outside it. That failed in the long run, like all other enshittification schemes. Facebook is failing now for the same reason. We'll see if Google's zero-click AI-scraping scheme fails too.
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At least in its current iteration, satellite internet is a scam. I've seen the costs, the caps, and the lag. It nowhere near justifies the price. I get that you're paying it back for all the infrastructure that was launched into space a hundred years ago but come on. The service today is seemingly more intended for government and corporate use... even then as a backup like dial-up.
Given the current blanketing of coverage, I'm a bit surprised that cellphone reception isn't in a better state. Those companies also run a scam on consumers: particularly the loyal ones in good standing. Bizarre how it all works. Still, given the option, I'd take a cell wireless over satellite (in its current form) internet.
Given the current blanketing of coverage, I'm a bit surprised that cellphone reception isn't in a better state. Those companies also run a scam on consumers: particularly the loyal ones in good standing. Bizarre how it all works. Still, given the option, I'd take a cell wireless over satellite (in its current form) internet.
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Much the same here! Plus, a free disc meant it was no real loss to experiment with. I took one apart out of curiosity. The first time I realised that I could cut the corner off of a 720KB disk and then format it as a 1.44MB, I nearly jumped through the ceiling
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Getting older beats the alternative. :~) I was a young kid in the late 80's BBS period on a Commodore 128 and it could take minutes to send a brief message. I miss the Wild West when gaming sometimes involved getting a book and spending a couple of evenings entering code and fixing typos. I also remember the magic moments it started making sense rather than being laborious data entry. Byte magazine (nostalgic sigh). Yeah, patience and a lot of disciplined thought in how information was exchanged in that period.
I remember going from Amiga to Mac when AOL hit the scene. I thought at that time it just doesn't get any better than this. In some ways, I suppose that was true.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I used to be a member of a BBS.
I used to ruin my Saturday mornings trying to download files.
I used to have friends in the discussion that were really far away.
I used to have floppies of AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe.
I still have the AOL tins they would mail.
AOL was gonna die when DSL arrived. Then the Time Warner deal sealed it.
"bbbbbbsssshshhhhhshhshshshsh brrrrrrrrrr shhhhhhhush bing bing bing.... Welcome! You've Got Mail"
RIP AOL. Won't miss you. And shame on you for still making people pay for email when they should have just left for free gmail or even Yahoo Mail.
I used to ruin my Saturday mornings trying to download files.
I used to have friends in the discussion that were really far away.
I used to have floppies of AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe.
I still have the AOL tins they would mail.
AOL was gonna die when DSL arrived. Then the Time Warner deal sealed it.
"bbbbbbsssshshhhhhshhshshshsh brrrrrrrrrr shhhhhhhush bing bing bing.... Welcome! You've Got Mail"
RIP AOL. Won't miss you. And shame on you for still making people pay for email when they should have just left for free gmail or even Yahoo Mail.
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That thousands of people in the US still have to use dial-up connections should be a national embarrassment.
It is certainly a sign of how backward internet service is in this country. Allowing a few giant firms to effectively oligopolize the market provides easy money for a few while retarding the adoption and expansion of internet-based services. (I live in a major city, in an older part of town, where it is not cheap for companies to build out better infrastructure, but not prohibitively so. I had to wait until 2018 to use "cloud" backups for my computers because upload speeds were so slow. It wasn't until a year ago that upload speeds were not painfully slow.)
It is certainly a sign of how backward internet service is in this country. Allowing a few giant firms to effectively oligopolize the market provides easy money for a few while retarding the adoption and expansion of internet-based services. (I live in a major city, in an older part of town, where it is not cheap for companies to build out better infrastructure, but not prohibitively so. I had to wait until 2018 to use "cloud" backups for my computers because upload speeds were so slow. It wasn't until a year ago that upload speeds were not painfully slow.)
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Got my networking start with a 300baud handset cradle modem, dialing into school computers working on my masters degree.
Posted this recently somewhere I can't now find, apologies for the repeat, but it just fits in this thread: One class has a group programming project, one of our group had one of those Kaypro luggable computers he'd schlep from house to house as we rotated through Saturday work sessions. One of our rotating hosts was a fellow with a rather large white parrot, sat on a perch in the living room where we'd work. One morning there, he was lamenting the parrot had stopped talking, just made screeching "Awk!Eek!Awk!" sounds. Kaypro guy set up the computer, started the dialup connection, and then we realized what screwed up the parrot...
Posted this recently somewhere I can't now find, apologies for the repeat, but it just fits in this thread: One class has a group programming project, one of our group had one of those Kaypro luggable computers he'd schlep from house to house as we rotated through Saturday work sessions. One of our rotating hosts was a fellow with a rather large white parrot, sat on a perch in the living room where we'd work. One morning there, he was lamenting the parrot had stopped talking, just made screeching "Awk!Eek!Awk!" sounds. Kaypro guy set up the computer, started the dialup connection, and then we realized what screwed up the parrot...
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When those services came about, I was in college. We knew of a openly accessible (to the world!) modem bank that was dial-out that was in a node city (GEnie... we played Air Warrior) so we could dial into our university modem bank and then out of that modem bank and into GEnie. It added a little lag but it was still useable. Of course, there were other ways to avoid long distance costs but this was a legal way. We still had to be careful of how much time we spent logged into GEnie, though... on a college budget, it was a luxury.
I didn't ever have to use AOL, though. By the time it was out, we already had access to The Internet pretty much directly... call into the modem bank at university and log into any of the Unix boxes we used for school and then Bob's your uncle. This was before they ran network connections directly to the dorm rooms. They didn't do that until a couple years after I graduated... man, that would have been so wonderful.
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Damn, I still have 2.5 hours left of my "get AOL for free for four hours!" that I signed up for way back in the early 90s. At the time I'd lost access to the Internet (through a previous job) and I was looking for a replacement. I picked up one of those magazines with the AOL trial disks and signed up for the service. AOL, I quickly determined, was not sufficient (why, they didn't even have Usenet access at the time!). I never did use the full free four hours promised.
(After much searching, I found a temporary replacement in the form of access through a local university for FTP and Gopher/Archie searches, and a local BBS which had a Usenet gateway. Eventually an internet dial-up service provider gave me all-in-one access. But AOL was never a real option; I couldn't stand its curated approach.)
(After much searching, I found a temporary replacement in the form of access through a local university for FTP and Gopher/Archie searches, and a local BBS which had a Usenet gateway. Eventually an internet dial-up service provider gave me all-in-one access. But AOL was never a real option; I couldn't stand its curated approach.)
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