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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
i got my start being a little shit on progs (literally, the channel was called progs)-- i will never forget those retards helping me in vb6 when my dll would break some ocx file here or there.
the most popular prog, was of course, rampage toolz 2.0 made by oogle but random independents like me could make a cool punter or ascii generator. i copied lots of other peoples' ideas and put them into one prog, with a minimalist design which was revolutionary in the year 2000 or whatever it was and called it cyanide tools.
in fact there were even chatbots back then, believe it or not
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] threadRIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.
:(
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
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.
https://www.dialupsound.com/
the most popular prog, was of course, rampage toolz 2.0 made by oogle but random independents like me could make a cool punter or ascii generator. i copied lots of other peoples' ideas and put them into one prog, with a minimalist design which was revolutionary in the year 2000 or whatever it was and called it cyanide tools.
in fact there were even chatbots back then, believe it or not