In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE)
It is $10/month for 30GB with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going over the 30GB limit.
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
51–60 of 240 posts
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#52This 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 ins…
Any thoughts on using Rust, Go, or Zig?
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#53I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#54Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the grandkids.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#55> 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.
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.)
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#56Dialup 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 if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.
Hacker News still worked of course.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL email address. The type of business he was in could involve old contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not lose that business. Long ago, when AOL stopped re…
What type of business was it? Consulting?
He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I like to think his stuff was more valuable.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#58> 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.
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
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#59For 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.
> hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was
you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
#60For 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.
They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.