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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Don’t forget that for most than one or two years they pushed “4% kill rate” for covid despite it being multiple orders of magnitude lower. The amount of people that went insane as a result of that blatant misinformation is incredibly high.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.
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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.
> 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-...
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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I think main use is email and instant messaging providing you don't autoload medias.
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.
> 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.
It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:
Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.
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.
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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).
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.
> 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
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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.
Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
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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)
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.
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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.)
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.
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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.
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.
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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-)
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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.
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.
I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.
AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.
Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
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.
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.
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.
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I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.
Yeah it largely just worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Don’t forget that for most than one or two years they pushed “4% kill rate” for covid despite it being multiple orders of magnitude lower. The amount of people that went insane as a result of that blatant misinformation is incredibly high.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
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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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.
I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.
Also: (“net.wars: The Making of an Underclass: AOL”) https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupre...
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.)
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...
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.
What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
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.
lol no.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
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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!
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).
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
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.
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.
TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
TIL AOL still exists
Me, too.
I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad
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.
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 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 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
https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytim...
I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)
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.
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.
Loved Trillian
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like
But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.
Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.
yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
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.
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
But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter?
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...
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 :-)
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.
Still available from MSN for the time being: https://get.msn.com/
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.
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?
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?
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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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
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).
The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.
I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...