Foundry (YC F24) is hiring staff-level product engineers (ycombinator.com)

One wonders what the dial up ops department/team at AOL even looks like now. I wonder if it's anyone's full time job, or just something that occupies a fraction of their time.

dlivingston · 48m ago

I'm surprised it's still being offered period! My parents live in a remote area outside of a rural town in one of the USA's smaller states, and even they haven't had dial-up in ~15 years. We grew up with dial-up until about 2010, when they switched over to (absolutely terrible) satellite internet. HughsNet, I think it was called. Two-ish years ago they switched over to Starlink and it's been working well (when it does work, anyway).

ack_complete · 37m ago

Apparently they just shut it down in 2024, but a couple of years ago I tested an Atari 1030 modem by dialing out to Earthlink, and it still worked -- successfully connected at 300 baud.

bobmcnamara · 11m ago

I worked somewhere with a small office run over Hughesnet. Some sort of upload-over-dial-up, broadband-download-over-satellite, with 1500ms latency for everything.

nosioptar · 24m ago

I know people just a couple hours from Seattle that still use dial up.

Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.

nemomarx · 6m ago

The telecom hasn't tried to get them on DSL? There's subsidized low income programs for it (or where, idk what the status is now) so I can't imagine the cost was much higher. And if I were an ISP I might eat the cost of the upgrade just to avoid support complications for a small set of customers.

chrisco255 · 18m ago

I don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.

grishka · 1m ago

I'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.

nosioptar · 15m ago

I think that's basically what they use it for.

Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.

dzhiurgis · 20m ago

Is dial up still at 56kbps?

chrisco255 · 10m ago

Yes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.

esseph · 13m ago

Still over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.

nosioptar · 15m ago

As far as I know.

(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)

neilpomerleau · 53m ago

https://www.dialupsound.com/

maxbond · 49m ago

Thanks for making that! Boy is that more annoying than I remembered.

twilightzone · 21m ago

That's subjective! I made a song with that sound in 1998. It was called "Net Pet" and it did pretty well on mp3.com.

apetresc · 14m ago

I didn't even know AOL was still around, let alone AOL dial-up.

800xl · 4m ago

I thought they were just a web portal and email service. It is amazing they still offered ISP services this long.

They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.

benchly · 9m ago

Do they still offer the floppies with the free hours? I need a new set of drink coasters.

loose-cannon · 56m ago

I wonder how quickly you can load some of the modern, popular, websites on a dial up connection.

philistine · 2m ago

You can test it yourself in the comfort of your gigabit connection. I wanted to test my barrage of very small images using lazy loading on a crappy connection. I learned that Chrome can easily pretend to suck. On Safari you somehow need to download a special tool but it works just as well.

Or as worse I guess.

sugarpimpdorsey · 19m ago

We have a whole generation of programmers that will justify 12MB of JavaScript bundles to output "Hello world".

No comments yet

derwiki · 48m ago

This orange site is fine but I wouldn’t hold my breath on any others

benchly · 3m ago

Something low-resource demand (like my blog) would probably be okay, save for a few large pics on some pages. Most people who run in the smolweb circles also like vintage computing, so creating webspaces using only HTML & CSS is common practice, which should do fine over a 56k connection.

smelendez · 16m ago

I’d bet a lot of them are using old computers too, with who knows what browser and OS. It’s probably hard to tell loading issues from rendering issues

donio · 28m ago

Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.

BobbyTables2 · 47m ago

Page loading times would probably be measurable with a sundial or calendar.

freitasm · 39m ago

Some time ago there were estimates on the number of people still paying AOL but using a broadband service.

I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."

ricree · 15m ago

>This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount

Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.

0xy · 46s ago

Benefits such as virus protection for email that you don't use, and a free AOL Toolbar with shopping offers you don't have installed. Thank you for your $10 a month you forgot we were charging you for 15 years.

JoshTriplett · 43m ago

Are there any sources indicating how many users dial-up still had?

orthecreedence · 27m ago

When I worked at AOL in 2010, dialup was their biggest source of revenue still. It'd be interesting to see the drop-off since then. I imagine it's trending down pretty quick as the generation using it kicks the bucket.

Kye · 35m ago

There's some good discussion on this recurring submission about the legendary dial-up process: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.windytan.com%2F20...

And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4

smitty1e · 54m ago

On the topic of technology life cycles, can anyone suggest important writers/references?