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A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#12Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage: >What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL,…
That's really cool! I actually did download an archive of aol-sucks while researching this, but the software I was using to look through the mbox file was kinda buggy so I gave up. I'm literally the meme of the miner guy giving up right before hitting diamonds.
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#13Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.
I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.
I'm taking the downvote in stride, but 14.4 and 28.8 RealAudio streaming seems like it lasted all of 3 months and then people had napster and were pulling 96k mp3s.
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#15The bit about Steve Schalchlin really affected me. The idea that someone's whole life could have been different, or much shorter, if they hadn't seen a piece of info at the right time. Gives me chills.
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#16In a touch of irony this blog is throwing some null error
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was gonna say, we absolutely had streaming music. Did it suck? Yes, but it was novel, so it was acceptable. I had a 33.6 connection that my ISP eventually upgraded to full 56K, which I discovered by noticing that the dial-up handshake sounded different. Man… I sound old.
You’ve unlocked a memory for me! I had that same experience when I heard a different series of squeals than normal only to realise the modem had negotiated something faster than 31.2!
I turned my squeals off.
Got a phone bill.
Turned on the sqeals.
Dialler.exe was calling the Seychelles.
That was back in the days when my telecom let me off the bill (7* my monthly income at the time) because 'You have a virus".
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.
I'm taking the downvote in stride, but 14.4 and 28.8 RealAudio streaming seems like it lasted all of 3 months and then people had napster and were pulling 96k mp3s.
[deleted]
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.
I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.
I used to listen to Art Bell on the Coast to Coast RealAudio stream - from the UK!
I think it was before "RealVideo" so it was still just "RealAudio" and not "RealPlayer". Or something like that.
Re: A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage
#20It's first paragraph leaves me disappointed. It's 1996. Worries over a tech bubble are a few years away. And there are no tensions with Russia really, because Americans didn't give a damn about the first Chechen war.