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

71–80 of 240 posts

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#71

Post by jonbiggums22 »

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…

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 the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around.

The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text.

The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#72

Post by freedomben »

chasd00 wrote: post #58
tomxor wrote: post #42

> 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

Heh, some great memories using the T1 line at the school. In the wild west days we Napster'ed at extreme speeds before someone narked us out 8-)

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#74

Post by Spivak »

morkalork wrote: post #11
robertoandred wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.

Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.

No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#75

Post by jonbiggums22 »

pflenker wrote: post #32
drittich wrote: post #24

For 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 remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs are heavy, b) the headquarters aren’t even in Germany so I would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shi…

The floppies were actually a bounty since they were rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids, which he instead kept in his office reached for when he needed to copy that floppy.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#76

Post by freedomben »

dfedbeef wrote: post #65
unethical_ban wrote: post #27

I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.

I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

Oh dude, I played a ton of Chex Quest back in the day. They did a really good job with implementation there. Honestly, an utterly brilliant marketing plan because to this day I still have major warm vibes for Chex brand. Wish they'd up the protein to carb ratio a bit though so I could eat it in good conscience :-)

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#77

Post by js2 »

drittich wrote: post #24

For 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? It's amazing how something that was as ubiquitous as AOL (and it was ubiquitous) can come and go in a single generation.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#78

Post by freedomben »

drittich wrote: post #24

For 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.

Indeed, and it kicked off a race of ISPs seeking to emulate. I probably had a dozen Blue Light (not to be confused with Blu-Ray) internet discs from K-Mart back in the day

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#79

Post by freedomben »

lousken wrote: post #73

Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.

For me it was downloading mp3 files and only letting Winamp play them on repeat as they download. At first you just got a second or two of sound, and it would add maybe a second on each play. Eventually the magic of compound interest would get you the whole song, and that was a major adrenaline rush

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#80

Post by jonbiggums22 »

robertoandred wrote: post #10
imzadi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.

Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.

Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore.

VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.

Post reply on HN