There was a mention of EarthLink in that thread. They still surprisingly have a very large office building in Atlanta.
They've also recently discontinued dialup.
soupfordummies · 1h ago
I guess they’re only commercial, right? I’ve tried to get them at every place I’ve lived in Atl and they’ve never been available. A lot of places you don’t even get to choose between Comcast/at$t - it’s one or the other.
rco8786 · 27m ago
I'm just happy to be in the Google fiber service area
I'd love to know what AOL's dial-up MAU for July 2025 was. I still remember when the first consumer v.56 modems came out. They were expensive but it felt so fast. We were living in the future.
soganess · 51m ago
56k v.90/v.92
My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.
DarkFuture · 57m ago
Dial up was a painful period, sitting in school Monday-Friday thinking about what I'm going to surf in the weekend because that was the only time it was available for the package my parents had in 1998/1999 here in UK. Counting down the hours on Friday evening until it hits 12:00am.
101008 · 22m ago
Similar experience but I think it made me value more my time online. That felt better. Now I'm online all the time!
acomjean · 37m ago
Yeah. I think you got 6 hours a month (or something). One other aspect I didn’t like was when using and my hosemates picked up the phone I’d get disconnected, they’d be annoyed.
seydor · 36m ago
I wouldn't do that. What if the swishy sounds of modems come back in fashion like vinyl players did.
lostlogin · 26m ago
I’ve got the sound as my ring tone. But my phone is usually on silent so I rarely get to hear it.
naz · 1h ago
It was awful having to use AOL dialup in the UK. My parents used it (it was one of the few ISPs with freephone) so I was stuck with it. The problem was AOL routed all traffic through Virginia. For someone in the UK that meant a minimum of ~130ms ping, ruining online games and making everything super slow
mickeyp · 1h ago
130ms ping with dialup was actually quite low. I suffered far higher with my dialup and it was a local isp.
giantrobot · 18m ago
For games I would have done awful things for a ping that low on dial-up. More typical for me was over 200ms. I did everything I could to tweak MTU and modem settings but could never break the 200ms barrier (that I remember).
nly · 1h ago
What? No Freeserve?
pixelesque · 1h ago
Freeserve was free to buy, but you paid for it with the 0845 number (like with a lot of other ISPs in the late 90s) you had to dial.
etempleton · 1h ago
My understanding years ago was that the service was surviving off of people who thought they still needed the service to access the internet even if they had broadband or kept paying for it even if they weren’t using it. Not sure if that is true or was just speculation.
GLdRH · 26m ago
Sometimes an entertaining lie is better than a boring truth.
RIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.
didip · 34m ago
I wonder how many people are laid off in this shut down.
edm0nd · 2h ago
{s goodbye
ashleyn · 2h ago
What's going on everyone? +++ATH0
WD-42 · 1h ago
I just owned you all with Methodus Toolz!!1
chrisco255 · 54m ago
There's a great podcast about the old hacks and warez for AOL that interviews the developers, hackers, and AOL employees from that era: https://aolunderground.com/
edm0nd · 1h ago
I'm loading up my 1IM punter now
esafak · 1h ago
a/s/l?
Loughla · 50m ago
I tell my kids not to share shit with anyone now. It's hilarious to me that it was literally the first thing you did when I was their age.
Simpler times, I guess?
matja · 1h ago
ATS12=255!
brewtide · 1h ago
I thought it was ATS2=255?
Either way, the memories!
andrepd · 39m ago
What does this one mean? :p
pimlottc · 10m ago
Basically, it makes it so you don't get disconnected if someone tricks you into typing "+++ATH0"
matja · 24m ago
It stops +++ATH0 in a IP packet (such as in a ping request, web page, etc) hanging up the modem by requiring a delay between the escape sequence (+++) and the ATH0 command.
While reading this headline, I heard a modem connection tone. Top that, AI.
iefbr14 · 53m ago
I wonder how many people are still actively using dialup and why. Frankly I cannot think of a single usecase.
nemomarx · 36m ago
from the last thread, there are areas that had phone lines but never DSL or cable, so probably that and legacy customers using the other aol services
ivape · 39m ago
The thing is dial-up was transmitting data via sound. It would be kind of interesting if that ever made a comeback for encryption purposes. Maybe not exactly through wires and modem, but I could see a universe where messages are sent via videos that can only be decoded by certain people that are recording the audio.
I don't know why we would do that though. Maybe someone else can riff off this idea.
Pigalowda · 16m ago
Maybe during electronic countermeasures? Only way to transmit information is through sound when the EM bandwidth is being disrupted.
paddy_m · 2h ago
I was recently wondering if that was still running.
Dial up was a huge cash cow because of the remaining subscribers who never cancelled, likely because they forgot or gave up trying, and AOL made it famously hard to do so.
metamet · 45m ago
I knew a family that exploited how hard it was to cancel by attempting to cancel every month and getting another free month. iirc, they did this for years until broadband was available.
shmerl · 2h ago
Did they still send AOL CDs to anyone in the recent times?
mikepurvis · 1h ago
That would be crazy given that having a CD drive hasn't been standard on new laptops for like a decade— Apple's last portable computer with an optical drive was 2016.
According to ChatGPT, the final AOL free trial CDs were in 2006.
echelon · 1h ago
How much would it be to mass manufacture and mail CDs these days?
Feels like it would be a fun marketing gag.
mrandish · 1h ago
That's actually a pretty genius idea if one were promoting a tech product with retro vibes and mailing to journalists/media. The main messaging would just be the color printing on the disc and sleeve as few would have a CD-ROM drive handy to play it, but those that do would love it if you put something cool on the disc (maybe a short Myst-like adventure with a product tie-in).
I still have a SATA CD/BD-ROM drive in my main PC system under the desk, not because I need or use it much but because the system is in an older tower PC case on wheels that I keep putting new mobos in because it's high-quality, flexible, roomy, quiet and has a ton of slide-out media bays. The CD-ROM has just stayed installed in the case as new mobos get installed and there's always extra SATA ports to plug it into.
chrisco255 · 1h ago
Yeah if anything you could print a qr code on it for people to download the content directly. Probably $1-$2 per disc.
drdeadringer · 1h ago
Perhaps some type of retro futuristic nostalgia millennial gag.
shmerl · 1h ago
You would think dial up was dead already for a long time too, but apparently it wasn't.
RajT88 · 1h ago
The elderly and maybe the very rural. I have a tough time thinking there is anyone rural enough who would not go for satellite internet though. Satellite TV is pretty standard in the country.
chrisco255 · 1h ago
I think its just pricepoint. Dial up was like $20 or $25 a month. If someone cares so little about modern internet to be fine with dial up speeds, they don't want to spend the money for satellite internet plus the dish and installation costs.
esseph · 36m ago
LEO isn't great if you're surrounded by trees, unfortunately.
I know a lot of people that were previously unhappy with their old ISP, went to LEO, and then returned to their old ISP within 1-3 months.
ghaff · 1h ago
I wonder how usable (probably pretty slow) dialup would be at this point. Somewhat of a comment of bloated web pages but also the reality.
chrisco255 · 1h ago
Probably only good for email at this point and I think for some that's fine.
shmerl · 39m ago
Dial up bandwidth is of course bad, but how is latency in dial up vs satellite? Geosync orbit satellite latency is abysmal, unless you are talking about low orbit.
jonplackett · 56m ago
I wonder if anyone was still scrounging for copies of Computer World to get another free trial CD
MiddleEndian · 1h ago
My impression of AOL was mixed.
I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
Spooky23 · 34m ago
It’s the opposite, the web was the new disruptor and AOL served everyone AOL as a pre-web online service, which continued to be used by their legacy users for many years.
Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.
There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.
user3939382 · 1h ago
AIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol but there may have been a way to bridge it with XMPP.
I was under the impression that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN all used XMPP. It seems that AIM added support for it in 2008, but Adium (and the other multi-chat clients) were just doing some magic to make it work seamlessly.
duskwuff · 40m ago
Definitely not. AIM, YIM, and MSN all used their own proprietary protocols, and multi-client messengers like Adium contained implementations of those protocols. There was no messaging between services (except AIM <-> ICQ), and some of the services supported features the others didn't.
RHSeeger · 48m ago
And Trillian.
I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...
They've also recently discontinued dialup.
https://www.dialupsound.com/
My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.
RIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.
Simpler times, I guess?
Either way, the memories!
:(
I don't know why we would do that though. Maybe someone else can riff off this idea.
Dial up was a huge cash cow because of the remaining subscribers who never cancelled, likely because they forgot or gave up trying, and AOL made it famously hard to do so.
According to ChatGPT, the final AOL free trial CDs were in 2006.
Feels like it would be a fun marketing gag.
I still have a SATA CD/BD-ROM drive in my main PC system under the desk, not because I need or use it much but because the system is in an older tower PC case on wheels that I keep putting new mobos in because it's high-quality, flexible, roomy, quiet and has a ton of slide-out media bays. The CD-ROM has just stayed installed in the case as new mobos get installed and there's always extra SATA ports to plug it into.
I know a lot of people that were previously unhappy with their old ISP, went to LEO, and then returned to their old ISP within 1-3 months.
I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.
There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOC_protocol
I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.