Comment by nstory

21 hours ago

Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.

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nstory

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ssl-3  20 hours ago

What a strange time machine.

The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.

I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

  • toast0  20 hours ago

    I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.

    [1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.

    • ssl-3  19 hours ago

      Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.

      It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.

  • jrochkind1  15 hours ago

    Very curious if you would actually get a dialup number that worked if you filled out the paperwork. I guess probably not? But I have no idea.

    • ssl-3  13 hours ago

      I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.

      I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.

      But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.