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Reported: AOL finally shuts down its dial-up service

Well that does not bode well for the MAGArats in the southern states. How will they get their propaganda now?
 
There's a long history of technology sticking around a lot longer than I would expect. Sony was still producing cassette walkmen up till 2004, with teh last care to have a cassette player in 2014, about the same time as the last VHS only player was produced. FAXes are still around and I'm pretty sure western union will still wire money around the world and they only stopped sending telgrams in the 2000s.

I'm sure there's others.
 
Thermal said:
Dial up was still around? The ◊◊◊◊ I learn here.
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I wouldn't be surprised if it's all some people need. Looks like around 175k people just don't need high speed internet. If you don't get on much and already pay for a landline, it's probably not even all that terrible anymore.

Too bad for those people. I would bet satellite is their only option. Which I would assume is much more, but admittedly I didn't read the article.
 
brrrrrrrrrr ping-ing ping-ing wheee tssssssssssssssssssssss.

I can't now remember the movie* but I remember a particular shot of a character's home PC, open on their emails, and a message arrives.

That was a shock. Not that the PC was left on unattended, it was that it was clearly left online. Being in a country which never had free local calls, the idea of leaving a computer dialed up online when not in use seemed ridiculous. And somehow I got the impression this was a home computer which wasn't even tying up the home phone line to be online. What sorcery was this?

*Some Sandra Bullock thing maybe about being a victim of hacking or some such fashionable panic.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
brrrrrrrrrr ping-ing ping-ing wheee tssssssssssssssssssssss.

I can't now remember the movie* but I remember a particular shot of a character's home PC, open on their emails, and a message arrives.

*Some Sandra Bullock thing maybe about being a victim of hacking or some such fashionable panic.
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The Net?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
brrrrrrrrrr ping-ing ping-ing wheee tssssssssssssssssssssss.

I can't now remember the movie* but I remember a particular shot of a character's home PC, open on their emails, and a message arrives.

That was a shock. Not that the PC was left on unattended, it was that it was clearly left online. Being in a country which never had free local calls, the idea of leaving a computer dialed up online when not in use seemed ridiculous. And somehow I got the impression this was a home computer which wasn't even tying up the home phone line to be online. What sorcery was this?

*Some Sandra Bullock thing maybe about being a victim of hacking or some such fashionable panic.
Click to expand...

A bunch of my friends had a phone line just for dial-up internet. Rich folk...
 
Thermal said:
The Net?
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Thanks. Yes. (So long as I'm not misremembering and it's actually a scene from a different movie. Right era though.) The only thing I can confidently remember about The Net is I watched a few minutes and flipped over.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Thanks. Yes. (So long as I'm not misremembering and it's actually a scene from a different movie. Right era though.) The only thing I can confidently remember about The Net is I watched a few minutes and flipped over.
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I vaguely recall the same shock you had when I saw it. "Where's all that noisy connection time?" I quite literally didn't know that was a thing. Where I lived at the time (fairly deep in the woods), we didn't even have cable or decent cellphone reception
 
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plague311 said:
A bunch of my friends had a phone line just for dial-up internet. Rich folk...
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I remember spotting that a friend had an ISDN line installed. In their own home! 64 kilobits per second, up and down! Imagine the inconceivable glamour of that! (I recognised the network terminal from using them at work.) He was something in banking and his employer had paid for it.
 
I had been hanging out in local BBSs around 1991-1992, and everybody was buzzing about the internet. IIRC I signed up for the free trial, decided I was interested, but after some more research I decided to go with a "real" internet provider, because I wanted access to the other parts of the net than the web, like IRC and Usenet. Was on dial-up until about 2000 and I can still remember the day I upgraded to a 28.8 baud modem from the old 14.4 baud. Why, I could download a 400 kb file in only a few minutes!
 
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In late 1993 I bought a 486/25 desktop with 4 massive megs of RAM and was soon online with Demon over a 14.4K dialup connection. I was briefly the coolest - and poorest - kid on the block.

My kids have 1 gig fibre connections in their places and 5G-enabled mobiles. While I'm sitting in my chalet high in the Alps and enjoying 700 megs duplex, which is frankly absurd as we didn't even get 4G here until 2019.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
I remember spotting that a friend had an ISDN line installed. In their own home! 64 kilobits per second, up and down! Imagine the inconceivable glamour of that! (I recognised the network terminal from using them at work.) He was something in banking and his employer had paid for it.
Click to expand...
A client of mine was an early adopter and had twin 64K ISDN lines and a liberal after-hours usage policy. That's when I discovered the joys of downloading. I was a Linux bloke from early days, my first home Linux machine running Red Hat 4.2, and the speed of acquiring updates and new packages...
 
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