I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
201–210 of 240 posts
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#202> 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.
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…
Modems stopped improving after 56k. I was always excited by the ability to pause the internet while another call came through but like all good things it came too late. And by that time I moved up (and likely was the last to move up).
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#203I'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…
AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#204I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up? Does anyone know?
It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i... But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.
Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#205Dialup 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…
Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?
I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:
- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome
- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
Heh. I know someone who uses VoIP via geostationary satellite internet connection. He tried Starlink as an upgrade, however, the 100W continuous power draw was a dealbreaker with his off-grid solar setup. This is off-grid enough not to have cell coverage. Anyway talking with him on the phone you pretty much have to use a "over" / "over and out" kind of protocol because of the long latency.
The starlink mini is in the 20w (idle) to 40w (active) range if that might help.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#207Dialup 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…
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.
> 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.
For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].
IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#208For 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.
I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail A few years back I was pacing a marathon and toward the end it was just me and a recent college graduate. Something caused me to mention AOL and she hadn't heard of it. I mentioned CD-ROMs and she said: "you mean, like for music?". She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995?…
> She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995?
Someone born in 1995 would normally be expected to be familiar with CDs because of their parents' music collection.
(And, depending on the family, because of their use as computer media. CDs were still important in 2005 when such a person would be 10.)
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#209I'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…
I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
The point is mindset. Someone willing to move not just across countries but continents will have it far easier to deal with computers and new technology in general than someone "set in their ways".
Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.