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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#181

Post by PhilipRoman »

jlokier wrote: post #38
morkalork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.

Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city: 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114 time=333689.274 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 tim…

wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#182

Post by keith82 »

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#183

Post by can16358p »

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#184

Post by sans_souse »

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#185

Post by somat »

tombert wrote: post #93

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.

    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

    block in on em1 probability 20%
But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#186

Post by endgame »

Baeocystin wrote: post #164
icedchai wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.

Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.

The experience of watching local LLMs produce text has a similar vibe to those old modem links. Everything old is new again.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#187

Post by throwawaylaptop »

Hobadee wrote: post #110
jandrese wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Ya man, my father (a grandfather) moved here from Poland, not speaking the language with $200, bought a house within 3 years in California, had a successful career in construction management building amazing buildings you might currently be sitting in.... How could he ever figure out Outlook, that takes real concentration and determination reserved only for no name state school cs grads under 40!

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#188

Post by slow_typist »

icedchai wrote: post #55
tomxor wrote: post #42

> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilo bits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.

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.)

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#189

Post by slow_typist »

keith82 wrote: post #182

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?

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#190

Post by noufalibrahim »

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

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