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 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.
staplung 11 hours ago [-]
> 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 long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
nicoburns 4 hours ago [-]
Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?
I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:
- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome
- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.
exikyut 9 hours ago [-]
> 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 compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."
beowulfey 11 hours ago [-]
Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.
shellwizard 10 hours ago [-]
There's https://ddg.gg if you don't mind using duckduckgo
brainwad 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and Firefox Mobile falls into it by default.
userbinator 12 hours ago [-]
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".
Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
mschuster91 3 hours ago [-]
> Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out.
For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].
IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.
Stuff like camera live streams are possible even without HTML. I remember one that used an infinitely-loading GIF. You'd just visit the GIF file directly and it would show you the livestream. It was awesome.
userbinator 10 hours ago [-]
multipart/x-mixed-replace was (and still is?) how IP cameras showed their stream.
Babkock 11 hours ago [-]
Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.
jacobgkau 11 hours ago [-]
There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make a name for themselves, and nothing will really stop people from wanting to do that. If your frustration is people using a certain technology simply for the sake of it being new, you should be focused on convincing them that isn't necessary to make good/useful tech and make a name for themselves, rather than insulting them for having general ambition.
"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.
jandrese 20 hours ago [-]
To be fair when you are put on the 128kbps penalty box with the cell provider they also de-prioritize your traffic to the very very bottom of the queue so it's almost impossible to even get the 128kbps, and if the network is busy at all you often get nothing.
but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example. Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.
MarkusWandel 18 hours ago [-]
This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.
We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.
childintime 5 hours ago [-]
I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.
Hobadee 20 hours ago [-]
> Email is always an option
Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.
throwawaylaptop 7 hours ago [-]
Ya man, my father (a grandfather) moved here from Poland, not speaking the language with $200, bought a house within 3 years in California, had a successful career in construction management building amazing buildings you might currently be sitting in.... How could he ever figure out Outlook, that takes real concentration and determination reserved only for no name state school cs grads under 40!
mschuster91 3 hours ago [-]
The point is mindset. Someone willing to move not just across countries but continents will have it far easier to deal with computers and new technology in general than someone "set in their ways".
Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.
prmoustache 6 hours ago [-]
Grandmothers have been computing for long enough to know what an email client is. It is the first thing we setup on my grandma's intel 486 computer (at a time we were all using pentium II and above) when she got dial up.
jonbiggums22 21 hours ago [-]
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.
peterleiser 10 hours ago [-]
I grew up in a town that did not get broadband internet access until 2017. Before that people had little to no high-speed internet service other than the town library (and they would park or sit outside the library to use the wifi when it was closed). They would also use cell phone data plans.
andersa 10 hours ago [-]
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.
RiverCrochet 14 hours ago [-]
A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
MarkusWandel 13 hours ago [-]
Heh. I know someone who uses VoIP via geostationary satellite internet connection. He tried Starlink as an upgrade, however, the 100W continuous power draw was a dealbreaker with his off-grid solar setup. This is off-grid enough not to have cell coverage.
Anyway talking with him on the phone you pretty much have to use a "over" / "over and out" kind of protocol because of the long latency.
nicoburns 4 hours ago [-]
The starlink mini is in the 20w (idle) to 40w (active) range if that might help.
bbarnett 3 hours ago [-]
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.
prmoustache 6 hours ago [-]
I think main use is email and instant messaging providing you don't autoload medias.
einpoklum 3 hours ago [-]
> 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:
that's apparently a lighter-weight client, though I can't vouch for it.
scarface_74 18 hours ago [-]
And the only reason she doesn’t have access to higher bandwidth is because rural America and conservatives consistently vote for politicians who cut funding for it….
Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
peterleiser 11 hours ago [-]
I see what you're getting at, but that doesn't explain bandwidth deserts in parts of rural California. They might have local conservative representatives, but the state leadership is obviously not conservative.
timbit42 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
tomxor 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
o11c 21 hours ago [-]
It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:
33.6 kbit/s (a later addition)
31.2 kbit/s (a later addition)
28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it)
26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice)
24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this)
21.6 kbit/s (apparently this was very common, though I don't remember seeing it)
19.2 kbit/s
16.8 kbit/s
14.4 kbit/s (quite possible)
(lower bitrates are also documented; this is all multiples of 2.4 kbit/s)
Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.
pragma_x 19 hours ago [-]
That's how I remember it.
For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.
Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.
56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.
Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.
Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.
icedchai 16 hours ago [-]
My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.
Baeocystin 11 hours ago [-]
Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.
endgame 7 hours ago [-]
The experience of watching local LLMs produce text has a similar vibe to those old modem links. Everything old is new again.
joquarky 10 hours ago [-]
No Courier, no carrier.
nashashmi 4 hours ago [-]
Modems stopped improving after 56k. I was always excited by the ability to pause the internet while another call came through but like all good things it came too late. And by that time I moved up (and likely was the last to move up).
imglorp 20 hours ago [-]
Don't forget the first mass produced consumer modems were 300 baud, and yes we're ignoring the model 37 teletype at 120 baud. Then 1200 baud came soon after for a huge improvement.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
hadlock 20 hours ago [-]
> 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
o11c 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Delk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
aidenn0 17 hours ago [-]
33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).
Babkock 11 hours ago [-]
I was born in 1996, this is like a bedtime story to me. I had AOL as a kid because my family was poor, but I do not remember any of the numbers. Please post more cool stuff like this.
sandworm101 20 hours ago [-]
Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
mcny 20 hours ago [-]
I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48 kilobits per second though never sustained.
I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).
throwaway984393 20 hours ago [-]
IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL
Hobadee 20 hours ago [-]
I remember being SOOOO jealous of my buddy, cause their family got a 28.8 modem! (We were stuck on 16k at the time, IIRC)
pixelpoet 22 hours ago [-]
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...
neuralRiot 16 hours ago [-]
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.
skerit 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Delk 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
rossant 12 hours ago [-]
I remember spending 4 hours downloading the GTA 2 demo on PC. My parents weren't happy with the phone bill later that month. But the wait was so worth it.
Hikikomori 5 hours ago [-]
Waited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.
madaxe_again 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.
icedchai 22 hours ago [-]
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.)
belthesar 18 hours ago [-]
With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.
Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.
icedchai 17 hours ago [-]
I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.
Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.
slow_typist 7 hours ago [-]
True, latency was much better via ISDN. Also we had channel bundling in Germany: 2 x 64 kbit/s. Shared via 10 Mbit/s LAN of course. The hub was a 19 inch beast with fans. Absolutely worked.
varispeed 21 hours ago [-]
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.
icedchai 21 hours ago [-]
You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.
kstrauser 20 hours ago [-]
Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.
My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).
A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.
aaronbaugher 20 hours ago [-]
I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there worked best.
varispeed 20 hours ago [-]
Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
icedchai 20 hours ago [-]
Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...
timbit42 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jandrese 20 hours ago [-]
IIRC connecting to the PSTN the best you would ever see was 48kbps, at least in the states, although if you were transferring uncompressed data in the clear sometimes the modem could compress it for you on the fly to get more data on the wire. In practice though big files tended to be compressed already so you rarely saw much benefit from that. You needed some sort of closed phone network that didn't compress the voice channel the way the phone company did in order for the modems to negotiate up to the max.
madaxe_again 6 hours ago [-]
Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.
timbit42 2 hours ago [-]
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!
Hobadee 20 hours ago [-]
Also, 56kbps was the MAX POSSIBLE speed. 48kbps was the maximum speed I ever remember seeing, with somewhere around 42kbps being more common. Occasionally I would connect at 36kbps, see the speed, hang up and try again.
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
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
freedomben 21 hours ago [-]
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-)
aidenn0 17 hours ago [-]
My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"), that might be the most 1990s thing I own.
madaxe_again 6 hours ago [-]
We intercepted the unencrypted microwave link between campuses, and basked in full ISDN glory.
They never did figure out where all their bandwidth was going, although the boarding house festooned with cat4 was suspicious. They came and snipped some more conspicuous cables, which were of course immediately spliced back together.
They tried to shut the internet down overnight in response, but their DNS level block was a mere roadbump, and in the end they got another ISDN line… which was immediately put to use in the downstairs kitchen VCD factory. Put the Hong Kong kids out of business, as with them you’d have to wait until next term, with us you got your warez tomorrow, with a fried breakfast.
trimbo 23 hours ago [-]
Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
jm4 11 hours ago [-]
I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.
ecshafer 22 hours ago [-]
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 rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
paulorlando 22 hours ago [-]
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.
I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers?
Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
themadturk 14 hours ago [-]
My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
unquietwiki 21 hours ago [-]
I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.
const_cast 17 hours ago [-]
Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm guessing Amazon is out of the question.
Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.
busterarm 22 hours ago [-]
I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.
Yeah it largely just worked.
nerdjon 22 hours ago [-]
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.
smelendez 21 hours ago [-]
It sounds like AOL won’t disclose that information and the only national survey anyone has cited doesn’t distinguish by ISP.
pwenzel 22 hours ago [-]
I also want to hear from the people who still maintain AOL in 2025!
Workaccount2 22 hours ago [-]
Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the grandkids.
WalterGR 11 hours ago [-]
Having very older parents, what an important use case!
Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.
Fortunately, I’m able to guide
my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
bityard 19 hours ago [-]
At this point, it would not surprise me if there was a very small but very enthusiastic community of retro computing enthusiasts with AOL accounts.
tharne 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
unethical_ban 17 hours ago [-]
They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
tharne 17 hours ago [-]
It's not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the fundamental fact that trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.
unethical_ban 17 hours ago [-]
A baby takes nine months to make and a moment to throw out a window. Shall we keep on with analogies?
I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson organization to lose all credibility due to occasional editorial lapses.
Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable organizations is the only thing binding society together from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.
Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though they're owned by an enabler of the current administration.
cruffle_duffle 9 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget that for most than one or two years they pushed “4% kill rate” for covid despite it being multiple orders of magnitude lower. The amount of people that went insane as a result of that blatant misinformation is incredibly high.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
burntpineapple 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
can16358p 7 hours ago [-]
I'm actually surprised that it still existed anyway.
Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point.
I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic.
Good old times.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.
nashashmi 4 hours ago [-]
AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.
timbit42 1 hours ago [-]
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).
1024core 20 hours ago [-]
I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.
aidenn0 17 hours ago [-]
It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.
My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
xunil2ycom 20 hours ago [-]
To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.
drittich 22 hours ago [-]
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.
pflenker 22 hours ago [-]
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) shipping heavy stuff is expensive, d) it’s easier to spread the word to everyone that they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to stop.
Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
jonbiggums22 21 hours ago [-]
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.
jandrese 20 hours ago [-]
And for people on the Internet every waking moment of their lives it's hard to explain how people got by at the insane price points those services had. AOL for example gave you 5 hours of dialup time per month. They billed by the minute. Every additional hour cost you $1. And they exploded in popularity because that was a far better price than their competitors (GEnie, Compuserv, Prodigy, etc...)
Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
ufmace 20 hours ago [-]
At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.
throwawayoldie 22 hours ago [-]
They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
aaronbaugher 22 hours ago [-]
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.
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dimator 19 hours ago [-]
Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.
lo_zamoyski 20 hours ago [-]
I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.
js2 21 hours ago [-]
I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture:
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.
thaumasiotes 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
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
serf 5 hours ago [-]
I forgot all about blue light.
they were popular among hacker types during the free phase because they were one of the free ISPs that had an easy-to-fake dialer for a straight tcp/ip connection for nix machines.
TechDebtDevin 22 hours ago [-]
What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
jandrese 19 hours ago [-]
They predated the web browser by several years. Even once they added a browser a lot of people didn't have computers powerful enough to run them. Netscape for example needed 8MB of RAM, which was a lot in the early 90s. Plus back then the Web wasn't nearly as dominant. A lot of discussion happened on the Usenet, which AOL also provided access to much to the chagrin of the existing Usenet users. Email of course was also huge. Mostly it was expected that you would stay within the walled garden of AOL's service, using the keywords in their fat client to load topics of interest. More like a corporate version of a BBS.
achandlerwhite 22 hours ago [-]
lol no.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
aaronbaugher 22 hours ago [-]
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.
chasd00 21 hours ago [-]
The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.
scarface_74 18 hours ago [-]
It wasn’t a browser by any modern sense of the word early on. All of the graphics were on the disk to reduce load time.
oniony 21 hours ago [-]
Don't forget the browser toolbar.
gstrike 22 hours ago [-]
And before they started sending the free CDs they would send 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone call and format away! Shipped!
noufalibrahim 6 hours ago [-]
So many pieces of the internet being discontinued. A little nostalgic but I don't really see the point in keeping dial up alive anymore.
When I was first exposed to the net, I used an email to http proxy. It was called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) and you sent a certain email address emails with requests for pages, posting to forms etc. Then walked away and came back and checked your inbox for responses. It was quirky but I did get some documentation and largish poster of Steve Vai back in the day using this which was kind of cool I guess.
I sent so many emails (first from pine and then from mutt) that I remember the email address by heart. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
da02 22 hours ago [-]
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.
jandrese 19 hours ago [-]
The caveat with this is that many people on dialup are the ones who live too far from civilization to get cell coverage. The only reason they have phone service at all is government incentives in the mid 20th century.
coolspot 19 hours ago [-]
For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).
magicalhippo 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
jonathaneunice 23 hours ago [-]
TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
dfedbeef 23 hours ago [-]
TIL AOL still exists
xunil2ycom 20 hours ago [-]
Me, too.
poisonarena 20 hours ago [-]
I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad
ransom1538 11 hours ago [-]
Me in 2002: "Wtf is this paper bill mom? You pay for email?" Me in 2007: "Mom. Just... stop"
JKCalhoun 22 hours ago [-]
Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!
empath75 19 hours ago [-]
When I worked at AOL about 10 years ago, dialup was _still_ responsible for 100% of their profits. Literally every other part of the company lost money (Mapquest, AIM, Huffington Post, their ad network, etc). They were making literally billions of dollars from it and it was like 90+% profit margin or something absurd. It was like a single server running millions of virtual modems.
sans_souse 7 hours ago [-]
Those dial-up sounds are pure nostalgia. It's amazing when you consider loading a .jpg used to occur gruellingly slow on dial-up, and downloading a 5mb file might take hours. Now we stream HD video without (much) hiccup even on slow fiber, cable etc.
st_goliath 22 hours ago [-]
So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?
busterarm 22 hours ago [-]
AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.
msgodel 12 hours ago [-]
It's funny, many people complain that the web got way worse after smartphones became common. It's the second eternal September.
jlarocco 20 hours ago [-]
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.
Hobadee 19 hours ago [-]
Except that the AIM protocol was reverse-enginnereed and you could then use a single client (GAIM/Pidgeon, Trillian) to talk to all your friends. The protocols nowadays are so locked down that there has yet to be a decent 3rd party implementation.
jlarocco 12 hours ago [-]
The AOL chat rooms were different than AIM.
From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM.
For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.
Melatonic 16 hours ago [-]
Loved Trillian
themadturk 14 hours ago [-]
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.
burntwater 16 hours ago [-]
The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got mail!". The doors opening/closing.
Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available.
Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
I had a thought a couple of days ago about the flood of emails and notifications that we enjoy the privilege of these days and came to the conclusion that, the value of the notification has a direct relationship with he amount of effort that went into creating it and the number of recipients it's destined for.
The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero.
The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value.
An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me.
We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.
A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds.
If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
somat 7 hours ago [-]
I run an openbsd firewall and was able to setup queues to limit connection speed. I mainly use it to banish iot devices to the shadow realm. (connectivity detection appears to work but it is slow enough that nothing really gets done)
If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues.
queue base0 on em0 bandwidth 100M max 100M
queue full parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 100M qlimit 128 default
queue limited parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 1K max 1K qlimit 128
match in on em1 queue limited
Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like
block in on em1 probability 20%
But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.
throwzasdf 20 hours ago [-]
Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.
tombert 19 hours ago [-]
yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
keith82 7 hours ago [-]
I do IT stuff for a local pizza chain. They are still on an ancient Linux POS system. With dumb terminals using PS/2 keyboards with 3 rows of function keys for buttons for every pizza topping and such.
I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers.
However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.
slow_typist 6 hours ago [-]
OMG how can you do business like that, depending on a sole developer. Ever thought of cracking the software?
JSR_FDED 11 hours ago [-]
I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)
yonaguska 22 hours ago [-]
I 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.
FerretFred 5 hours ago [-]
I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it
unethical_ban 22 hours ago [-]
I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.
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 :-)
xunil2ycom 20 hours ago [-]
The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5 in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so much garbage.
Still remember when AOL cut our internet after I got spicy at 9 years old because I was mad at my cousin. Mom was very unhappy. We got internet back, but I wasnt allowed on for months. Lots of memories there.
I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.
hopelite 23 hours ago [-]
I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up?
Does anyone know?
torgoguys 22 hours ago [-]
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 requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.
da02 22 hours ago [-]
What type of business was it? Consulting?
torgoguys 22 hours ago [-]
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.
stetrain 22 hours ago [-]
There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive.
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
xunil2ycom 20 hours ago [-]
I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably priced.
What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.
imzadi 23 hours ago [-]
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.
robertoandred 23 hours ago [-]
Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
jonbiggums22 21 hours ago [-]
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.
aaronbaugher 21 hours ago [-]
AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.
Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.
jonbiggums22 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.
fapjacks 19 hours ago [-]
No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.
icedchai 16 hours ago [-]
I've done modem calls over VOIP. Any connection above 2400 is incredibly unstable for the reasons you describe.
clint 23 hours ago [-]
You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet.
I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
londons_explore 22 hours ago [-]
But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com
clint 16 hours ago [-]
You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.
morkalork 23 hours ago [-]
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.
nemomarx 22 hours ago [-]
Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
jlokier 22 hours ago [-]
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 time=332673.845 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114 time=332618.215 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114 time=331050.087 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms
dbbr 21 hours ago [-]
5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
jandrese 19 hours ago [-]
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 dropping them.
PhilipRoman 8 hours ago [-]
wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.
codazoda 22 hours ago [-]
Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.
clint 22 hours ago [-]
Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
yladiz 23 hours ago [-]
In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
Spivak 21 hours ago [-]
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.
MDGeist 21 hours ago [-]
I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.
londons_explore 23 hours ago [-]
Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month for the last 30 years for.
InitialLastName 22 hours ago [-]
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.
criddell 22 hours ago [-]
Are they wrong?
InitialLastName 22 hours ago [-]
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.
bluedino 19 hours ago [-]
I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I had it linked to some famous .com service that I have been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to have a live human reset the password and get back in.
Supermancho 22 hours ago [-]
Yes
themadturk 14 hours ago [-]
Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)
scarface_74 23 hours ago [-]
It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade
But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
londons_explore 22 hours ago [-]
Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.
Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.
toast0 20 hours ago [-]
There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.
OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
protocolture 22 hours ago [-]
>I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.
Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.
londons_explore 21 hours ago [-]
software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers.
You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
hopelite 4 hours ago [-]
That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.
Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.
johnwheeler 23 hours ago [-]
Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
lousken 21 hours ago [-]
Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.
freedomben 21 hours ago [-]
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
sys_64738 13 hours ago [-]
I remember downloading IE4 over a phone line at the inlaws. It took hours for a few MB. It was worse if I recall as I already had broadband via Road Runner back then (1998).
pcdoodle 19 hours ago [-]
The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.
whoomp12342 20 hours ago [-]
I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...
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.
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 long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:
- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome
- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.
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 compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."
Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].
IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...
"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.
but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example. Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.
We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.
Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.
Unfortunately, our economic / labor system mostly does not reward innovation at all, which leads to many people burning out mentally and not pursuing change anywhere because they perceive that they invest time and mental effort, but run against walls of bureaucracy, intra-corporate fiefdom fights and a lack of money. And that mindset transfers to outside the workplace as well.
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.
Anyway talking with him on the phone you pretty much have to use a "over" / "over and out" kind of protocol because of the long latency.
Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.
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.
Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
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.
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.
For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.
Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.
56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.
Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.
Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
"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 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.
I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).
I got DSL a few weeks later.
(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)
I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.
Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.
My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).
A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.
They never did figure out where all their bandwidth was going, although the boarding house festooned with cat4 was suspicious. They came and snipped some more conspicuous cables, which were of course immediately spliced back together.
They tried to shut the internet down overnight in response, but their DNS level block was a mere roadbump, and in the end they got another ISDN line… which was immediately put to use in the downstairs kitchen VCD factory. Put the Hong Kong kids out of business, as with them you’d have to wait until next term, with us you got your warez tomorrow, with a fried breakfast.
Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.
Yeah it largely just worked.
Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.
Fortunately, I’m able to guide my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson organization to lose all credibility due to occasional editorial lapses.
Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable organizations is the only thing binding society together from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.
Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though they're owned by an enabler of the current administration.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point.
I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic.
Good old times.
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).
My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
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.
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.)
they were popular among hacker types during the free phase because they were one of the free ISPs that had an easy-to-fake dialer for a straight tcp/ip connection for nix machines.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
When I was first exposed to the net, I used an email to http proxy. It was called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) and you sent a certain email address emails with requests for pages, posting to forms etc. Then walked away and came back and checked your inbox for responses. It was quirky but I did get some documentation and largish poster of Steve Vai back in the day using this which was kind of cool I guess.
I sent so many emails (first from pine and then from mutt) that I remember the email address by heart. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
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
A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.
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.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM.
For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.
Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available.
Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.
The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero.
The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value.
An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me.
We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.
If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues.
Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers.
However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...
I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.
Does anyone know?
Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.
https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.
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.
Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.
I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
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 dropping them.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i...
But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.
OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.
You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.