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).
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.
My parents didn't have AOL when I was a kid; we had Prodigy, I think because they had promotions to get a cheap or free computer if you signed up for N years of Prodigy internet.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
3 million CD frisbee salute for our old friend (which pissed off our parents because we held up the phone like loading dynamic drive so they couldn’t call their sister)
> AOL's former chief marketing officer Jan Brandt estimates that the company spent more than $300 million handing out all those free trials. The marketing effort allegedly cornered half of the world's CD market.
Intense nostalgia. It brings me back to a point in time where the world suddenly turned and the possibilities seemed limitless. And all of those possibilities looked a little more idealistic, and a little less mercenary than what we actually got.
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
Over in the UK, our phone lines are about to become 100% digital. Anyone with the old analogue modems now has some rather nice paperweights. I've still got an USR Robotics modem that was originally 14.4k, got upgraded a few times from 33k6 to v92 and an Hayes v92 modem gathering dust in storage.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadI wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
weeeeeeeeeee
kzzzzzzzzzzz
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
> AOL's former chief marketing officer Jan Brandt estimates that the company spent more than $300 million handing out all those free trials. The marketing effort allegedly cornered half of the world's CD market.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/aol-cd-rom-collect...
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
I always create an alias to make that sound and another for the matrix phone sound when I connect to the internet.
the sound files are available here: https://www.soundjay.com/dial-up-modem-sound-effect.html
for the matrix:
alias wifion="nmcli dev wifi connect 'wifi-name'" && paplay /path/to/soundfile/matrix-phone.wav
for the old dial up tones:
alias wifioff="nmcli d disconnect wlp3s0" && /path/to/soundfile/dial-up-modem-02.wav
linux has loads of these sounds in /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo
Shutting down services is what happens when a brand is bought up by private equity. Them and Yahoo are owned by Apollo.
Thought 2... DIALUP IS STILL AROUND?!?!