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.
At a law office I worked in during the 90s, several of the secretaries and paralegals had AOL Instant Messenger installed on their machines for IM inside the office (and to/from people outside the office too, I'm sure). I dunno if it violated any licensing agreements, but it worked well and didn't cost the firm a penny.
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
221–230 of 240 posts
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#222Dialup 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
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I also just double-checked this with my 24 y/o daughter and much to my chagrin, she also wasn't familiar with CD-ROMs. So that lead to a conversation about CD-ROM drives, ripping music, Napster, ... all things she was unfamiliar with.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#224A family friend came round and used it to hook up my Atari ST to a local BBS. Mind-blowing. I got a brief glimpse of the future that day.
Local calls not being free, I wasn’t allowed to repeat the experiment until we signed up for MSN in 1996.
Didn’t stop younger me switching on the acoustic coupler with no computer attached and trying “communicate” with it by making “shhhh” noises into the cups :D
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that. Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropp…
I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.
But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.
When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.
I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations.
I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment.
With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.
When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#228Earlier 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…
> 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 compatibilit…
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?authuser=0&visi...
So if the basic HTML mode is still buried in there somewhere, how do you get to it, if only for nostalgia's sake?
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#229Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.