back in the early 00s I used to do AOL tech support. Even then a lot of people were on cable or DSL. Vast majority of calls we got were from people out in the boonies or the elderly so it doesn’t surprise me that there are still a good chunk of people on dialup.
Actually by that point most of our calls weren’t even for Dial Up. the thing with AOL support back then was if the user also had other computer issues unrelated to AOL that they brought up while on the line with us we HAD to address them and try to do support for it. Callers would discover this fact and use AOL tech support as a defacto go to tech support for ALL computer issues. They’d start off with some random easy to fix (they knew how to fix) dialup issue and then would say “oh wow you fixed it, I wish you could also help me with this problem I’ve been having for awhile with…” and yup, we’d roll our eyes and say “oh, what what’s wrong?” A good chunk of my calls, believe it or not, would be for printer issues.
I still use my old aim account as my spam email email address. Any business asks for my email, they get that one. There’s like 5,000 unread emails in there. It keeps my actual email uncluttered and not full of spam. It’ll be a sad day when they close down those servers, then I’ll have to to dust off the ole Hotmail account lol
Hell, I’m sure there are still some places that only have dialup.
Wow. I didn’t know that dial up was still a thing in the US
Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.
POV: Be a software developer. It’s 2025. You’re maintaining dialer software for an ISP. The software is written in Delphi or Visual Basic. It’s all you’ve done since 1995. You’ve got 5 years to retirement. Corporate announces end of life for dial up services.
Not too bad really, considering that software developer has milked that cow for way longer than anyone would’ve thought. Those last 5 years will be challenging though, but maybe the software developer can sprinkle some AI over their resume and magically land some weird role that nobody can explain why we need it in the first place.
Oh wow, dial-up in Germany died 20+ years ago. I’m surprised that’s still a thing. Well, was. But until now is really staggering. I wonder what you could even still do over such a connection, considering that even messenger services and email now use 3-5MB just completing the server handshake.
Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/
And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there’s nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.
In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.
In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.
The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn’t been in a long time. But that’s the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.
Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven’t updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.
Just over the weekend I browsed trough my old blog (yes, those were a thing too) to check which year I did some remodeling on our house and stumbled on a note where I complained about slow 3G connection about 10 years ago. Compared to traditional dial-up that’s still orders of magnitude faster(~10/1Mbps back then on our location) but on a snowy day (with severe packet loss) it apparently took 10 minutes to get Skype and XMPP to even log in and over a minute to get SSH session open.
I suppose you can just barely get email trough today and even then you better not be in a hurry.
I miss the old internet.
i miss the red dragon inn </3
It’s a really fun drinking boardgame game now.
What’s that?
it one an rp chatroom on aol were i had my first taste of d&d and larp back in the day
https://anarkeith.blogspot.com/2011/10/legacy-of-red-dragon-inn.html?m=1
https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7bq0ov/the_red_dragon_inn_aol_chatroom/
Nice, thanks for the explanation!
LORD is still out there if you look. I think they have leaderboards under a new name
TIL AOL still exists.
Me too!
(obscure reference time)
Well, sounds like this is the end, guys. It was good getting to know you. I knew those 30-day free trials would run out eventually.
AOL used to setup kiosk systems at computer stores so customers could experience AOL in the store, and each store was given a login account. Long after the kiosks went down, these accounts remained active, providing those employees “in the know” with free AOL all throughout its pay-by-the-hour years.
But I only needed three more 30 day trials to finish downloading cd2 of the phantom menace cam that I started in 1999…
AOL was dead to me the day they dropped support for Neverwinter Nights.
AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.
Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?
AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.
…I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still… why?
I actually had no idea that Firefox only exists because of AOL (The Mozilla Browser evolved into Firefox for those not in the know). Thanks for sharing that interesting bit of history.
They actually didn’t; the timeline is off. Mozilla was spun off as an open source version of Netscape Navigator in January 1998. Netscape was acquired by AOL in November.
Jamie Zawinski, who had been a major proponent of open sourcing it within Netscape, was a critic of the merger.
To be pedantic there really wasn’t a standalone browser, it was the Netscape (later Mozilla) suite which was browser email WYSIWYG HTML editor and an irc client. Firefox, then called Firebird, was them fully decoupling it from the suite.
Also that’s why the email client is called Thunderbird, it was meant to be a separate but complimentary program to Firebird.
The pedantic part is that it wasn’t an evolution. The suite never died, it’s still around. They have a shared Netscape/Mozilla Suite ancestor. It’s called SeaMonkey.
Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.
Understanding this joke makes me feel old.
Deep cut appreciated and approved of.
Wow this is one of those instances where I’m simultaneously surprised something still exists and also find it to make a lot of sense that it still exists.
Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.
Any alternatives to the Starlink?
While not the same thing, cellular internet is not bad these days. I’ve been on T-Mobile’s internet connection for a couple years and other than CGNAT making self-hosting harder, it’s been pretty solid. This is in a rural area where we got to choose between Cable or go get fucked for high speed internet for a long time.
The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.
I read months ago that Amazon was stepping into the game but I haven’t heard anything since then.
What we really need to compete against Starlink’s network full of small satellites threatening a Kessler syndrome incident is a second network full of small satellites threatening s Kessler syndrome incident. And a third and a fourth.
Or put fiber everywhere.
Starlink satellites are in low Earth orbit. They could still cause Kessler syndrome, but aren’t as much of a concern as higher orbits.
Here are some quotes regarding this from and Aerospace America article
Regarding satellite proliferation, while there are many more satellites, the company responsible for most of them, SpaceX, places its Starlink satellites in a low orbit so they can naturally deorbit relatively soon — within five or six years, per SpaceX — if they fail.
At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell. “In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.
That’s just “the worst possible consequences won’t happen”. The danger at higher orbits is that things wouldn’t come down, and we couldn’t safely launch rockets past that orbit. That wouldn’t happen here, but destroying everything in LEO would still be pretty bad. Astronauts would likely die.
Currently, no one compares to Starlink, unfortunately. It’s really that much better. Source: FiL has been on the beta since the first constellation went up.
Kuiper and Guowang are currently launching satellites. It will probably be a few years before they are operational though.
I worked there from 2002-2005. Was 2 cubicles down from the guy responsible for sending out the “free trial!” CDs. Fun times
Imagine the shear amount of waste that guy helped put on the planet! A few spots away from a real life villain!
Oh yeah that dude made a LOT of trash. But we were working the elevator on the Death Star, man. It wasn’t his idea to do it, just his job to execute it. I suppose he could have refused to do it on principle, but they’d have another person hired within an hour. Ethics and values rarely put a roof over your head, though. AOL was the biggest employer in the area and their executive suite was ruthless. Blame them, not the guy clicking the button.
I still have one, still in the cellophane. I use it as a coaster.
You got more use out of it than most
Do you remember what you guys were using to burn millions of CDs at the time? Genuinely curious how it was done at that scale, as I think it was one of the biggest CD campaigns.
At that scale discs are stamped, not individually burned. Same as how music CDs and DVDs were made.
No idea. He clicked a button, they went out. I’m sure there was a big factory in China. Anytime new registrations were down for the month, send out another batch.
GET OFF THE INTERNET! I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!
Ok, mum! Let me just upload my geocities site.
This was pretty much the very first thing I did when I got a job. Fit a second line for modem use!
I did that too, then i discovered i could log two computers into EverQuest and dual box.
Rip my pcmcia modem card 😭
Telephony still exists! It’s still good, it’s still good!
