AOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic.
Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
Have they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!
I really miss those sounds. Learned so much about all the different frequencies. No to get too woo-woo but did you know each tone is actually two frequencies a high and low one?
The video above shows dialing either LOVE or FEAR. Not sure where this app is going but I had this idea to help catch myself whenever I'm following fear vs love.
Awwww, my teenage years reborn. I was just down the road from Westwood Village Drive, Tysons Corner in Reston learning to kung fu, math, hack, and talk to girls on AIM. I mastered 2 of those things.
Keen to give this a shot as I had stacks and stacks of AOL CDs and floppies in my youth.
Hey all — thanks for checking out Dialtone. I plan to open-source the server code eventually; for now I’m just having fun with it and continuing to iterate.
I’m a firm believer that a reverse-engineered system like this — especially something so historically “90s internet” — ultimately needs to exist in an open-source way.
To show I’m serious about the reverse-engineering work (and not just the nostalgia), here are two critical tools I’ve built for understanding AOL and its protocols:
• WireTap: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap
A packet-level tracing tool for capturing and analyzing the conversations between an AOL client and server.
• AtomForge: https://github.com/iconidentify/atomforge
A full-blown FDO → ATOMSTREAM compiler. FDO is the bespoke scripting language AOL used to define “forms.” Before forms are transmitted over the wire (wrapped in a “P3” frame), they’re serialized down into bytes — AtomForge handles that whole pipeline.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadOne thing I’d wish for would be for it to use an LLM other than grok though.
Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze
P3OL makes 100€/month through Patreon, I guess that is also this project's reason to stay closed-source
https://i.imgur.com/LGXEU7z.mp4
I really miss those sounds. Learned so much about all the different frequencies. No to get too woo-woo but did you know each tone is actually two frequencies a high and low one?
The video above shows dialing either LOVE or FEAR. Not sure where this app is going but I had this idea to help catch myself whenever I'm following fear vs love.
The new AOL is meta.
Keen to give this a shot as I had stacks and stacks of AOL CDs and floppies in my youth.
I’m a firm believer that a reverse-engineered system like this — especially something so historically “90s internet” — ultimately needs to exist in an open-source way.
To show I’m serious about the reverse-engineering work (and not just the nostalgia), here are two critical tools I’ve built for understanding AOL and its protocols:
• WireTap: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap A packet-level tracing tool for capturing and analyzing the conversations between an AOL client and server.
• AtomForge: https://github.com/iconidentify/atomforge A full-blown FDO → ATOMSTREAM compiler. FDO is the bespoke scripting language AOL used to define “forms.” Before forms are transmitted over the wire (wrapped in a “P3” frame), they’re serialized down into bytes — AtomForge handles that whole pipeline.