AOL dialup is ending
Are you kidding me? Dialup? It was still around?
AOL dialup is sort of like the coelacanth, but its days are numbered:
AOL, the company previously known formally as America Online, is discontinuing its Dial-up internet service after 34 years.
The service will shutter on September 30, meaning “the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued,” the web service provider said on its website.
I know people who still have AOL email, which won’t be affected.
I bet most of you remember the tonal sound of dialup, and the wait. I certainly do, although I never used AOL. Hey, I remember search engines before Google.
I first got online around 1995, mostly to get information about my arm injury. I never thought I’d use the internet that much, and just look what happened. Hooked.
Dialup will never die as long as Software Tool & Die is still around.
https://theworld.com/
I recall reading a 1995 book by Cliff Stoll*, “Silicon Snake Oil,” wherein he doubted the longevity and usefulness of the internet.
This WikiP article notes that he later acknowledged his error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil
* Stoll was also the author of an earlier, interesting book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, about his time working as a system admin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I first “got online” in the fall of 1993 during my freshman year of college. It was part of our orientation. We were the first class to all get 386 laptops with Windows 3.1 installed. The college had set up a LAN in these brand new dorms with ethernet ports in all the rooms.
I remember all the laptops came with a dongle that converted from the coaxil on the laptops to (what must’ve been) 10 megagbit cat3 . We could only access the internet from the computer lab in the library though. I remember someone walking us through how to get online from a few PCs they had in the computer lab. They were using the NCSA Mosaic browser and they showed us a couple super primative web pages. There weren’t even any search engines yet back then so there was only a home page with some links to some of the very few websites that were up at the time.
At any rate, I think I might’ve sent an email to my roomate or something since they’d set up email accounts for all the incoming freshmen. I wasn’t overly impressed.
It was all a novelty and I couldn’t really fathom how it could be useful to me. I really never used again until probably 1996 or so when I was doing some research for an assignment. Then I was impressed at how far the internet had come in just a few short years. It now had search engines like Yahoo and Webcrawler and the Netscape Navigator browser was far superior to the primitive Mosaic one.
I remember getting swamped with those AOL 3.5 flopply discs back in the 90s.
Originally the easy entry path for newbies was either Compuserve or AOL. I chose poorly, LOL, because Compuserve didn’t last very long. Turns out the server was a long distance call, my first month’s telephone bill ended that little experiment!
Shortly after Netscape Navigator’s release I found the “real” web on my 12 baud dial-up. It might have been 12 baud on a good day. Click on a link, go do some chores, come back to see if the page was finished loading.
When we moved to the country and cable was not available, we were back to dial up for about five years until wireless internet became available on the few occasions when the nearest cell tower was responding. Then tried five years of a local wireless provider using high mountain top towers. It required perfect line of sight, and was similarly unreliable. We kept dial up as a backup for emergencies, until the telephone company quit maintaining the copper lines. We and our neighbors could not even do voice calls, eventually.
It wasn’t until 2019 that we paid exorbitant fees to have a cable line extended up our road, now using VOIP for landline and finally have reliable internet service. It was worth the five figure expense to have the lines run, especially because our nearest neighbor works from home for an employer two hundred miles away. He couldn’t do that without that big spend, and he and his family are good neighbors.
“I know people who still have AOL email, which won’t be affected.”
There are a lot of tech savvy folks on this site, so maybe no one is reading that sentence apprehensively, however, to clarify, whether any email provider is affected in the form of disappearing, or ceasing to function is solely a business decision.
The domain to the right of the @ sign in your email address is owned by someone and it is just an identifier, a name that resolves to a numeric address that points to a mail server. If the company that owns that address goes bankrupt, or, even if the physical location where the mail server resides is bulldozed, there is no reason your email will be affected as long as someone has a financial interest in keeping that name alive.
And, if you’re on an email service provider of any size someone will always want that customer base. And, there is almost no cost associated with keeping additional @xxxx.com email domains on a mail server as aliases. And mail servers are cheap and fairly easy to run.
AOL was initially a stand alone company.
Then it was bought by Time Warner.
Then it was acquired by Verizon.
Then Verizon merged it with Yahoo.
So, your @aol.com email, twc.com email, @verizon.net email and @yahoo.com email all likely go to the same email server farm today. And they were all individual at a point in the past.
No matter what happens to AOL, or whatever company name you initially obtained your email account from it is likely someone will be interested in owning the email domain and hosting a mail server it points to. On the low volume end this can be done for less than $100/year, so economics have little to do with it.
Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, I was on all of them at one time or another. What I really miss is GEnie. So many of my favorite authors hung out on there.
An email address you have from a school or your employer, can go away, however. And, if they manager their mail servers well, should go away. Employers can kill your business email address whenever they choose and most schools let you know they’ll only keep your address active for a period of time after you leave. Employee emails are a liability to a company in the case of legal discovery in a future case. The less the better. Keeping former employees’ and students’ email around costs money in storage and it can be risky, so it’s a good practice to nullify dead accounts.
I was a grad student at Los Alamos Science Laboratory (before the name change) and used a dial-up modem, either 300 baud or 1200 to access a not-quite-castoff CDC 7600 supercomputer of yesteryear. Woohoo! Fortran baby!
They would make multiple updates per week to the OS, which oddly would routinely “break” the programs you were writing. So you had to keep abreast of them, & fix your code periodically to keep it running. Buying a desktop PC with an 8087 math processor was heaven, as I was now in control.
Then Compuserve. In my civilian DoD job, ARPANet was available, and the techy guys were all a-buzz when the transition to the Internet started. The entire campus had T3 and a backbone throughout at the beginning. Many of the early guys were carping about how the Internet would eventually become awash with advertising. Oh yeah.
I actually worked at AOL for about a year and a half in 2004/2005, until they laid off 80% of the company.
It was actually a pretty good job. I worked on the infrastructure. They were doing some cool stuff with their own open-sourced web server that was integrated with the Tcl programming language. It was fun to work on. Believe it or not, their in-house IT department was really good, although the less said about HR, the better. I had a great boss, but she got laid off too.
The first thing everyone did when I said I worked for AOL was to ask me something about the client, but I always had to respond (truthfully) that I had never used it and knew nothing about it.
I’m not surprised their dial-up is still around.
I too used a dial-up, 1200 baud modem in my first two coding jobs. There was always a big relief when you heard the tones increase to a muddled blur once the modems on both sides shook hands and agreed everything was kosher.
It wasn’t too long until you cold buy a laptop with a built in modem card and RJ11 port. And then NIC cards with RJ45 ports. And now most laptops have no communication ports; it’s all WiFi.
— Colocomment
He wasn’t totally wrong. There was a lot of truth in some of what he said.
Remember that at the time, the Internet was getting the same sort of dreamy bubble-fantasy commentary that Large Language Models (i.e. “AI”) does now. It was going to eliminate war, wipe out economic inequality, eliminate colleges and schools, undercut national governments, etc., etc. The culmination of that nonsense was probably the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” by the late John P. Barlow.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
If Stoll underestimated the importance of the Internet, Barlow and his fellows went much, much too far the other way.
I’m a generation younger than Barlow, and I knew the Declaration was sheer nonsense the day it came out, so it can’t be ascribed simply to the ‘folly of youth’.
Of course similar claims were made about the invention of the telegraph, if you go back and look. There’s a strong utopianist desire to believe that human nature can be circumvented by Logic, Reason, and Progress. It never works out.
One common trope of technological history is that ‘old tech’, once widely in use, tends to stay in use for a very long time afterward. That’s been observable in practice at least since the start of the Industiral Revolution. Sometimes it’s because a piece of ‘old tech’ simply works well. Sometimes it’s because it’s so expensive to change it once it’s in place that it’s cheaper to put up with the limitations than to replace it. Sometimes it’s because the new tech simply isn’t available or compatible with the extant old tech.
(Hence the number of mainframe computers still using COBOL as the year 2000 approached. It’s become a misconception that the Y2K problem was fake, but in fact it was real. It was just that it was overhyped, and in practice the major issues had been dealt with by the time 2000 rolled around.)
Another factoid: as late as the 1950s, there were still working farms in the United States that still used horses as the primary power source. Not museums or show farms, but real farms growing food for sale.
Many rural towns in the USA were not electried until the 1930s. Party-line telephones were still in use in places in the 1950s.
In World War II, horse-drawn artillery was still used in actual combat.
So I’m not at all surprised that dial-up is still in use.
RTF @ 2:42,
The college I worked for about 15 years ago eliminated a lot of emeriti benefits mainly in the health insurance area. People were upset. One small compensation was they guaranteed our email address would remain for life. It’s what I use. It would be a major pain to lose it.
I used dialup and did not make the switch to fast internet until after Hurricane Katrina.
I’ve lived in south Louisiana since 1999. Hurricane Katrina was awful. I was on staff at a Baptist church and was responsible for coordinating disaster relief efforts. Cox cable and ATT were down and people could not get online.
But I could. Landlines still worked. And I used dialup. Yeah sure it was slow but I could send/receive email.
After things settled down I finally switched our household to Cox cable internet. I was also the Computer Guy(tm) at the church and they agreed to cover half the cost because I could use fast internet to check on the church’s network and client computers.
HC68
Another factoid: as late as the 1950s, there were still working farms in the United States that still used horses as the primary power source. Not museums or show farms, but real farms growing food for sale.
In 1960, we visited my father’s WW2 Army buddy in Tennessee. He had a working mule—or was it a donkey—on his farm. It was a reasonably prosperous farm, judging by their house, which was comparable to my paternal grandparents’ farmhouse—and bigger than my maternal grandparents’ in-town house that their farm financed.
Many rural towns in the USA were not electried until the 1930s. Party-line telephones were still in use in places in the 1950s.
Yup. Relatives told me that their rural towns in Oklahoma and Illinois got electrified in the 1930s. I guess I should ask a cousin if the towns got electrified earlier than the farms. My guess is yes.
I don’t know precisely when party-lines were stopped in my rural hometown, but from memories of friends listening in on party lines, they lasted for us until at least 1963-1964. Some friends on the same party line overheard some female classmates of mine talking. In their candid, intimate conversation they said some things that, had the whole school known, would have been very embarrassing for them. (“Do you think I’m sexy?”) We never repeated to others this conversation, because the person saying it was very kind—didn’t want to hurt her—and we knew that we wondered similar things about ourselves, as did most of junior high age.
Decades later, I fessed up to her.
I never used AOL e-mail, let alone its dialup. IIRC, my brother in the DC suburbs had dialup Internet circa 1990, where I learned to play Tetris. While I used the Internet at school or at work, I didn’t get Internet at home until 2005.
Side story about dial up. My high school (1969) had access to the district’s computer. That was a big deal. The computer had a whopping 16k of memory. The math teacher was very excited as he got the dial up modem and teletype in his classroom. That’s where I first learned BASIC, and the programs we could store on paper tape to feed back into the computer through the reader attached to the teletype.
BASIC was a great language that you could do a lot with, and easy to learn without the terrible syntax etc of Fortran. I wasn’t happy when Microsoft dropped BASIC from their OS.
My father got a grant in the 1970s, I think, for a $2K computer that had a tiny screen like a modern calculator. It seemed a wonder to us at the time.
I still use an earthlink.net email address from the 1980s. They keep selling the company, but the address still works, usually. For backup I opened a gmail.com account a while back. I still use my cellphone number from back then, too, unless it was the 1990s.
We had a party line until at least the mid 70’s in a Cincinnati suburb. I think we didn’t lose it until we moved away from the old heavy black dial phone.
physicsguy,
Makes sense, and I should have stipulated student body email addresses. Faculty are a different matter, as someone may want to reach them years after they depart related to research, etc. Especially emeriti faculty.
HC68,
“… ‘old tech’, once widely in use, tends to stay in use for a very long time afterward.”
Three years ago a recruiter for a consulting firm managed to track me down. His client was still running COBOL programs I had written about 30 years prior! It was flattering to know they were still viable.
@ physicsguy – FORTRAN was my primary “working” language in college, even after the university upgraded their main computer, which spoke PL/1. A common t-shirt on campus proclaimed the wearer as “FORTRAN jock – I speak in GoTo’s”
The “joys” of debugging a program where the bug resulted from a GoTo a non-existent location (usually after a revision) haunted my nightmares for years.
The sound of the connection is known as “the handshake.” I’m surprised I’m the first to say it.
My grandfather told me as a kid their first car was a model t that was used as a stationary engine for the Kansas wheat farm.
He had a navy contract in WWII to supply piling which he and his partner cut in Oregon and hauled to their mill with horses. After about a year they got 1912 Cat. I have his partner’s double-bit axe. I don’t how I ended up with it. We call it Leo’s axe.
We had a party line in Alabama in 1966. My mother hated it.
I have a Vt100 clone sitting on top of a S-100 bus CP/M machine with 8-inch floppies in my collection. The 1200 baud modem still works.
Thank god there’s still CompuServe.
Fortran is still around and is a modern object-oriented computing language that runs on modern computers. You don’t have to use GOTO anymore (and shouldn’t). It’s primarily used for numerical work. There’s so much scientific software written in it that it made more sense to keep updating the language rather than abandon it for a different one.
Niketas ans AesopFan,
Having Fortran as object oriented would have been a miracle back in my day. I still remember the horror on the look of a student as we were walking into the university computing center with our programs. It was a winter day in Boulder. My Fortran program was about 10″ thick and the cards bound with a large rubber band. The other guy was carrying a 2ft long box of cards. He slipped on a patch of ice and the box of cards went flying. The sight traumatized me, I can’t imagine what it did to him.
Tom Murin,
“The sound of the connection is known as ‘the handshake.’ I’m surprised I’m the first to say it.”
About 6 hours prior to your comment I wrote, “… the tones increase to a muddled blur once the modems on both sides shook hands and agreed everything was kosher.”
😉
Rufus,
Ha. Well, I was the first to say “handshake.” You said, “shook hands.”
I must be the anachronism: I still use AOL dial-up. I’m poor, and it’s –uh, it WAS– cheap. $12 a month, annoying as heck, but it does what I need. And now I’m looking at $25 a month for a replacement dial-up service. Ten bucks a month here, twelve there, all-the-costs for all-the-things going up “just a tiny bit, to keep it affordable” … and eventually all-the-things stop being affordable. Siiigh.
@physicsguy: For my master’s I wrote code for variational and diffusion Monte Carlo computations, all in Fortran 95. At first I balked, but my advisor said I can write in Fortran 95 or I can learn how to make my C programs call and run Fortran 95 code, so I just went with Fortran 95. Didn’t kill me. I didn’t do anything object-oriented but I was able to write structured programs just fine.
And of course it’s easy to translate formulas into Fortran, which of course is the basis for the name of the language…
No punch cards, obviously, just plain text files passed to a compiler which probably translated it all into C anyway.
There was a dial-up service introduced way back in 1932…the TWX (teletypewriter exchange) service. As this ad explains the service, it basically provided email and text messaging.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61181.html
…you could send a message at any time and the print-out at the other end would wait to be read, similar to today’s email, or type back and forth interactively, similar to text messaging.
Initially, you ‘dialed’ the connection by typing to an operator, who would sent up the connection…in 1962, automatic dial service for twx was introduced.
Multiple twx connections were multiplexed onto a single voice-grade phone channel, I believe about 20 connections per channel.
Dwas…GEnie. The service was introduced by GE Information Services partly to take advantage of slack computing and network capacity at hours when their business customers were less-active. Based on what I’ve heard, the service grew so fast that it ate up all the slack capacity and further growth at the same rate would have required procuring new equipment just for that service..whereas the original business case had been a ‘by-product” argument: we have this capacity sitting there, may as well sll it to somebody. Again based on what I’ve heard, the woman who was running GEIS at the time didn’t see resourcing GEnie at that level as being a good investment.