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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#41

Post by paulorlando »

ecshafer wrote: post #19
trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#42

Post by tomxor »

> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second

Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#43

Post by busterarm »

ecshafer wrote: post #19
trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

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…

I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.

Yeah it largely just worked.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#44

Post by magicalhippo »

This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three later.

I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently.

I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker.

Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day.

Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#45

Post by gamache »

Pour one out, RIP to a real one.

In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#47

Post by InitialLastName »

criddell wrote: post #25
InitialLastName wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they don't continue to pay for it.

Are they wrong?

As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the subscription offers other services (tech support, "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to keep access to your email address without paying the $50/month subscription.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#48

Post by nerdjon »

trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing.

Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#49

Post by aaronbaugher »

achandlerwhite wrote: post #36
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?

lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.

Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.
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