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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#171

Post by WalterGR »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #54
trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it 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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#172

Post by jm4 »

trimbo wrote: post #4

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#173

Post by shellwizard »

beowulfey wrote: post #170
staplung wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lo…

Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.

There's https://ddg.gg if you don't mind using duckduckgo

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#174

Post by peterleiser »

jonbiggums22 wrote: post #71
MarkusWandel wrote: post #56

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…

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…

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#175

Post by Kye »

drittich wrote: post #24

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.

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...

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#176

Post by andersa »

jonbiggums22 wrote: post #71
MarkusWandel wrote: post #56

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…

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…

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#177

Post by joquarky »

pragma_x wrote: post #123
o11c wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

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"),…

No Courier, no carrier.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#178

Post by userbinator »

LoganDark wrote: post #167
userbinator wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

multipart/x-mixed-replace was (and still is?) how IP cameras showed their stream.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#179

Post by exikyut »

staplung wrote: post #165
MarkusWandel wrote: post #56

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…

> 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 lo…

> 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."

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#180

Post by cruffle_duffle »

tharne wrote: post #39
trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

[flagged]

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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