I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.
For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.
> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three later.
I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently.
I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker.
Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day.
Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better.
In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.
In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE)
It is $10/month for 30GB with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going over the 30GB limit.
I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.
Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat.
My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached.
Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".
Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway)
The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.
Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.
I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
As much crap as AOL used to get, there's not much difference between their chat in 1996 and Teams and Slack now. And it managed to do it with 8 Mb of RAM over a 14.4k modem. Of course it didn't have video, but the group chat itself was basically the same.
In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
I run an openbsd firewall and was able to setup queues to limit connection speed. I mainly use it to banish iot devices to the shadow realm. (connectivity detection appears to work but it is slow enough that nothing really gets done)
If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues.
queue base0 on em0 bandwidth 100M max 100M
queue full parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 100M qlimit 128 default
queue limited parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 1K max 1K qlimit 128
match in on em1 queue limited
Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like
I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.
Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.
Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.
The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5 in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so much garbage.
Still remember when AOL cut our internet after I got spicy at 9 years old because I was mad at my cousin. Mom was very unhappy. We got internet back, but I wasnt allowed on for months. Lots of memories there.
I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.
I do IT stuff for a local pizza chain. They are still on an ancient Linux POS system. With dumb terminals using PS/2 keyboards with 3 rows of function keys for buttons for every pizza topping and such.
I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers.
However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadDoes anyone know?
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently.
I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker.
Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day.
Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.
My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached.
Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.
Hacker News still worked of course.
Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.
Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.
I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.
She can access her GMail account using a mail client like Thunderbird (which is deteriorating, but works), or any one of many other alternatives:
https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/top-free-open-source-email-c...
> Facebook
I could recommend avoiding that particular tar-pit, but if your mom is there, maybe try:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+lite+desktop&ia=web
that's apparently a lighter-weight client, though I can't vouch for it.
In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.
If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues.
Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.
I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.
I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers.
However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.