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.
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.
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.
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.
Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.
Deep cut appreciated and approved of.
Goodbye!
YOU’VE GOT MAIL!
Your mailbox is full!
That’s not what I wanted, hew-man!
I thought we all had a collective and unsaid agreement not to talk about this one
Statute of limitations ran out.
TIL AOL still exists.
Me too!
(obscure reference time)
AOL… America Offline
Wow. I didn’t know that dial up was still a thing in the US
AOL was dead to me the day they dropped support for Neverwinter Nights.
i miss the red dragon inn </3
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/
Nice, thanks for the explanation!
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
Yea I guess so. Man that must be difficult.
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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.
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.
I don’t think you appreciate how remote many people are in the US. There’s now way they would ever run cable or ISDN out to them. A run of an ISDN line can only be really short.
