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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#191

Post by prmoustache »

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.

Grandmothers have been computing for long enough to know what an email client is. It is the first thing we setup on my grandma's intel 486 computer (at a time we were all using pentium II and above) when she got dial up.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#192

Post by prmoustache »

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…

I think main use is email and instant messaging providing you don't autoload medias.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#193

Post by madaxe_again »

neuralRiot wrote: post #149
pixelpoet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#194

Post by madaxe_again »

varispeed wrote: post #83
icedchai wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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.

Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#195

Post by madaxe_again »

freedomben wrote: post #72
chasd00 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-)

We intercepted the unencrypted microwave link between campuses, and basked in full ISDN glory.

They never did figure out where all their bandwidth was going, although the boarding house festooned with cat4 was suspicious. They came and snipped some more conspicuous cables, which were of course immediately spliced back together.

They tried to shut the internet down overnight in response, but their DNS level block was a mere roadbump, and in the end they got another ISDN line… which was immediately put to use in the downstairs kitchen VCD factory. Put the Hong Kong kids out of business, as with them you’d have to wait until next term, with us you got your warez tomorrow, with a fried breakfast.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#196

Post by BLKNSLVR »

burntwater wrote: post #147
jlarocco wrote: post #90

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#197

Post by serf »

freedomben wrote: post #78
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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#198

Post by childintime »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #132
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…

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.

I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#199

Post by brainwad »

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.

Yes, and Firefox Mobile falls into it by default.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#200

Post by Hikikomori »

neuralRiot wrote: post #149
pixelpoet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.
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