Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 240 posts

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#211

Post by b112 »

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…

A surprising number of sites still work without js. CNN even, as an example.

Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#212

Post by Delk »

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.

I remember downloading Debian 3.0 ISO images over what I think might have been ISDN. I didn't know you didn't need all six or seven CDs in order to install.

(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#213

Post by einpoklum »

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

She can access her GMail account using a mail client like Thunderbird (which is deteriorating, but works), or any one of many other alternatives:

https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/top-free-open-source-email-c...

> Facebook

I could recommend avoiding that particular tar-pit, but if your mom is there, maybe try:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+lite+desktop&ia=web

that's apparently a lighter-weight client, though I can't vouch for it.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#214

Post by Delk »

o11c wrote: post #122
hadlock wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum) "56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998 and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC

It's not a matter of what the modems were capable of, it's a matter of what the phone line would and could actually carry. Maybe it would be different in a big city, but I don't think I ever saw anybody get over 33.6 before upgrading to DSL.

I lived in a city but I got a connection at ~48k on a V.90 regularly.

It did depend on line quality, though. We had some kinds of splitters and internal cabling in the house for allowing multiple phones (and eventually the modem), and I remember that prior to some changes made to that, I only used to get up to ~40k.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#215

Post by skerit »

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.

I remember downloading the last 2 episodes of Star Trek Voyager of of an FTP server through Windows XP's Explorer. 2 WMV files of 50 megabytes each. Took all night. If a single issue had happened I would have had to start the download all over, but it worked out fine!

I got DSL a few weeks later.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#216

Post by timbit42 »

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.

A friend of mine replaced the twisted pair from where it entered his house, to his modem with a piece of coax. He claimed it helped.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#217

Post by timbit42 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #194
varispeed wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A decade after they went off the market I came across one still in the shrink wrap and gag gifted it to a couple of friends. Neither one wanted it for some reason. "Oh, gee, thanks". LOL!

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#218

Post by timbit42 »

My first modem was the 300 baud VIC Modem Commodore made for the Commodore VIC-20. It was supposed to be the first modem for under $100 which they achieved by not having those rubber cups for the receiver. Instead, it plugged directly into the wall. Years later I found out the first modems were 110 baud.

I bought the VIC Modem second hand but the only thing I could connect to was another friend who had a modem. We transferred some files but decided it was faster to drive over to his house with a disk and then drive back.

I also tried connecting to a data service listed in the yellow pages, and the modem would connect, but then I couldn't get it to do anything. The service was listed as being free but I didn't realize it was a long distance call to connect to it and that wasn't free so my parents ended up with an $80 long distance bill from my modem calls.

Then I had a 1200 baud modem Commodore made for the Commodore 64. Again, I was only able to connect with other friends who had a modem.

When I got my Amiga 2000, I set up a BBS (FidoNet 1:255/42) with a SupraModem 2400. Later they had a deal for sysops to get their new 14,400 modem. I can't remember if it was buy-one-get-one-free, or buy-one-get-one-half-price. I only had one phone line so I sold the second one to a friend who used my BBS the most. At least someone could benefit from my having 14,400.

I also remember playing Battle Chess over the modem with a friend who had a PC clone. We were playing one day and my mom called me to supper so I set Battle Chess on my Amiga to autoplay while I was eating. When I came back my friend had no idea I had left. Good laugh.

I think I had a 33,600 next and then finally a 56K before moving to a city where they were testing HFC internet which was hybrid-fibre-coax around 1997 and was 10 Mbit/s both up and down. It was screaming fast compared to dialup and I could download a CD ISO in under 20 seconds while my friend back home were still downloading ISO images via dialup. (Just did the math and it should only take 8 to 9 seconds, so I guess there was a bottleneck somewhere).

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#219

Post by sgerenser »

paulorlando wrote: post #41
ecshafer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower ra…

Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.

Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#220

Post by timbit42 »

In 1997 I got a job at a college where only the college administrators had internet and it was via WinProxy and a modem on my desktop PC. They were paying for a number of ISP email addresses. They also had a static website hosted elsewhere on a pre-OSX Mac.

I was able to propose spending $1,000 on a web/email server and putting in a 56K ISDN line for a lower monthly cost. This also gave them full control over their web server to write PHP and use MySQL. It also allowed every staff member to have an email on their own domain and web access. We also put Squid proxy on the server to cache some of the web browsing. It worked well. Later when we were able to upgrade to DSL, we also added the computer lab to the internet. Fun times.

Post reply on HN