AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day
AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after its debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day
AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day
Wow. I didn't know that dial up was still a thing in the US
Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.
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.
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...
i miss the red dragon inn </3
It's a really fun drinking boardgame game now.
LORD is still out there if you look. I think they have leaderboards under a new name
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/
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.
TIL AOL still exists.
Me too!
(obscure reference time)
I miss the old internet.
I worked there from 2002-2005. Was 2 cubicles down from the guy responsible for sending out the “free trial!” CDs. Fun times
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.
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.
Fitting that it's ending in (eternal) September.
Understanding this joke makes me feel old.
Deep cut appreciated and approved of.
GET OFF THE INTERNET! I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!
Ok, mum! Let me just upload my geocities site.
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.
AOL was dead to me the day they dropped support for Neverwinter Nights.
Rip my pcmcia modem card 😭
Telephony still exists! It's still good, it's still good!
… In the U.S., for instance, the latest government census data indicates approximately a quarter of a million remaining dial-up holdouts.
One of the natural successors for internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places is satellite, with around eight million subscribers in the U.S. …
...and a similar disparity in cost.
Goodbye!
Wow 34 Years of Dialup. Who still uses dial up? I guess that naive of me and is coming from a place of privelege.
But still dial up??!
If you live in a rural area, it seems plausible
Up until probably about a decade ago I would occasionally go into small shops that used dial up to process credit card payments. There may still be some places doing that but I haven't noticed it in a while.
FFS will people ever use "it's" and "its" correctly ?
"Could of" and similar phonetic replacements making no sense whatsoever irritate me more.
Here at least the logic is arbitrary, "Anna's apartment" and "school's leadership" vs "Anna's waiting" and "school's empty", but "its tail" vs "it's cold".
OK, I'm not a native speaker as it may be clear.
Fwiw, the logic is, "its" isn't quite the equivalent of "Anna's" or "school's."
Rather it's the equivalent of "his," "hers," and "theirs." Also "mine" but that's just irregular af. In other words, possessive pronouns don't take an apostrophe while possessive nouns do.
It's not a LOT of logic, a pretty shaky ladder, but there it is. 0
(Oh, and for both nouns and pronouns, position in the sentence makes a difference whether to use a contraction at all, or go with the separate "is." But that's a horse of a different color!)
The one that kills me is the positive use of "anymore," which I've come to learn is colloquial to Northern Ireland and the midwest US, but good lord it just doesn't sound right when people say stuff like "everybody's cool anymore" instead of "everybody's cool now." For some reason I felt like it was becoming more common but now I'm thinking it might just be my exposure to midwest.social.
It's not are fault, it's the school's!
My autocorrect always tries to correct "its" to it's" no matter the context
Same. But that shouldn't be a factor in a professional publication.
Yeah its so annoying when someone uses the wrong one
Oh you.
First, could be autocorrect, and second: How many languages do you speak FFS?
AOL... America Offline
After it is debut?
Ah the USR sportster. An ubiquitous workhorse of the early '90s
No more free AOL disks? AWWWW
What?
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.