If you used the internet at home a couple of decades or more ago, you’ll know the characteristic sound of a modem connecting to its dial-up server. That noise is a thing of the past, as we long ago moved to fibre, DSL, or wireless providers that are always on. It’s a surprise then to read that AOL are discontinuing their dial-up service at the end of September this year, in part for the reminder that AOL are still a thing, and for the surprise that in 2025 they still operate a dial-up service.
There was a brief period in which instead of going online via the internet itself, the masses were offered online services through walled gardens of corporate content. Companies such as AOL and Compuserve bombarded consumers with floppies and CD-ROMs containing their software, and even Microsoft dipped a toe in the market with the original MSN service before famously pivoting the whole organisation in favour of the internet in mid 1995. Compuserve was absorbed by AOL, which morphed into the most popular consumer dial-up ISP over the rest of that decade. The dotcom boom saw them snapped up for an exorbitant price by Time Warner, only for the expected bonanza to never arrive, and by 2023 the AOL name was dropped from the parent company’s letterhead. Over the next decade it dwindled into something of an irrelevance, and is now owned by Yahoo! as a content and email portal. This dial-up service seems to have been the last gasp of its role as an ISP.
So the eternal September, so-called because the arrival of AOL users on Usenet felt like an everlasting version of the moment a fresh cadre of undergrads arrived in September, may at least in an AOL sense, finally be over. If you’re one of the estimated 0.2% of Americans still using a dial-up connection don’t despair, because there are a few other ISPs still (just) serving your needs.
Yahoo being owned by Verizon now…
And both are owned by Chinese Tencent which also makes Weixin communicator.
Yahoo is not owned by Tencent. Yahoo is currently owned by Apollo Global Management, which acquired a 90% stake in the company in September 2021. The remaining 10% is held by Verizon.
Verizon Communications Inc. is a publicly traded company and is not owned by another company.
Nice one, except it’s fake news as Verizon is indeed owned by the Chinese since 2021. There was even an attempt by Trump administration, but it went nowhere.
The ownership structure of Verizon (VZ) stock is a mix of institutional, retail, and individual investors. Approximately 39.35% of the company’s stock is owned by Institutional Investors, 0.02% is owned by Insiders, and 60.63% is owned by Public Companies and Individual Investors. (https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/vz/ownership)
… about to be run into the ground with the Verizon “customer management practices” …
I don’t agree this is the end of Eternal September.
As Mon Sep 11668
We need stop the government’s from ruining the internet and human right on privacy and communication.
TIL: AOL still provides dial-up service.
Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people still used it! And 175,000 people are still on dial-up (of any kind) in America!
Reminds me of an old Freeware Point&Click game from the 2000s, “The Breakdown”.
The story plays in the desert, the owner of the gas station has a then-new Windows XP machine in his secret room, complete with internet connection.
This must been dial-up, too, considering the wooden power/landline poles drawn in the game.
Review:
https://acid-play.com/download/breakdown-snack-sized-adventure-game
Game (archived):
https://web.archive.org/web/20070703074641/http://thebreakdown.adventuredevelopers.com/files/TheBreakdown_v099_setup.exe
Although in the year 2000 dial up pretty much was the default, ADSL also ran via traditional phone lines. It wasn’t available everywhere, because your quality of connection varied a lot with the distance to the local office. But it ran over the legacy infrastructure.
I’ve had it in 2013ish. Solid connection, just slow at 10Mbps (the rated speed was 20, at least it was cheap at 30 euro a month with the better option of internet via the TV cable being over 50)
Meanwhile to this day I’m still confused how dialup still exists… and then I remember that the Digital Broadcast Transition was “scope culled” down to only being about analog TV in the final bill that actually became law, while prior proposed versions of it were supposed to also abolish dialup (as well as DSL, which is basically just dialup on a D-for-Dedicated analog phone line so it can go a bit faster than on the standard shared lines)…
That’s…. not how DSL works. Maybe you’re thinking of ISDN?
(I know, SIWOTI…)
Back when the bottom fell out of the economy (Deja Vu) I was on local dialup. The typical USR modem, latter I acquired a modem with an ethernet jack.
My first job in IT was at an AOL help desk. I heard “Beep-beep-beep-bop… Bing-bing-bing bong shhhhhhhhh…. Welcome! You’ve got mail!” all day long.
Was working there the day they premiered AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and that was fun :-)
Sadly, I didn’t get any stocks.
That’s even worse than admitting you know cobol.
The real Christopher de Vidal should kick you square in the balls.
No shame here. I eventually moved on to making six figures which is remarkable because I never went to college; Just OTJ training like that. That job was near my house and I didn’t have a car so I bicycled in. I probably wouldn’t even be in IT today if not for that job.
We all have to start somewhere.
I wouldn’t admit it.
AOLer!
Anybody else remember when AOL bought Netscape and they all got @aol emails?
A bunch of people quit before the stick stuck to them.
ME TOO!
(sorry, couldn’t resist the classic Eternal September comment.)
I well remember the days of modem usage; my first Pace Linnet modem was a 1200 baud unit that was painfully slow even for text-only Telnet use.
How far we’ve come!
Yes, but there’s something about old FSK/AFSK connections.
The connections are established very quickly and there’s little error correction needed.
Which in some situations can improve overall speed.
See, modern modems use QAM and other technologies
and need to figure out a connection first, before the real communication takes place.
An old 1200 connection is near instant, though.
And because of better SNR, there are fewer characters lost.
That’s why low-tech 1200 Baud on Packet-Radio was faster than high-end 9600 Baud sometimes.:
The 1200 Baud connection worked more reliable, there had less error to be corrected.
Because if a packed was corrupted, the other side requested a re-send – which needed time.
AX.25 had no FEC (forward-error correction yet), like FX.25 has nowadays.
Using 1200 bps acustic modem didn’t work for OceanGate though. The “boom” from implosion arrived before “dropped two weights” message XD
I used a Hayes 1200 baud modem to connect to our college. I was ‘glad’ Turbo Pascal was available for my Dec Rainbow at that time, so I could do CS homework locally and then upload to the Vax. Otherwise as you say… Painful…. but doable!
I think the only “eternal” thing about AOL was connected to their billing practices.
“You’ve got mail!” had been used a dozen time around the globe, too.
Those that had @aol emails will NEVER get the stink to go away.
Pity. I kept my AOL account (and a modem card) at work as backup for the inevitable IT failures at one of the universities that claimed to have Invented the internet. Saved me more than once in the pioneering days of online teaching.
Guess it’s time to wake Billie Joe Armstrong up. Not it.
I’ll stick with D-Dial. It’s been around longer. :) I remember being on IRC and whenever someone
from AOL logged into the local channel, they were immediately kicked and banned.
AOL got another word to replace the word America. Granted, dialup for the time was the most technological thing out there. With the Commodore 64 as a popular 8 bit machine at the time, downloading was SLOW.
There was nothing like it at the time. Imagine, being able to call up another computer and in a few hours
playing a game you didn’t have to spend money on. Mom! I’m on the phone!!!
Dailup, in 2025. Wow.
We got dailup at home in 1994, which was replaced by 128/64kbit ADSL in 1999. Eventually we got Coax internet as it was much faster. I recently moved from a 600/50mbit coax connection to 1000/1000mbit fiber.
If I remember correctly there is only one provider in my country (Netherlands) left that provides dailup and it’s not intended for regular users, but for journalists in other countries as a way to upload their data outside of firewalls etc.
I still remember my mIRC script to auto ban AOL users on IRC. Was a mod in a huge channel with thousands of users. AOL users were usually very annoying to deal with and thanks to the AOL system, they reconnected, got another hostname and could easily evade bans that way.
Here in Germany, ISDN was the best there was until 1999 when DSL got introduced.
Permant connections (T1 equivalent) excepted, of course.
But that’s also because Germany wasn’t so much aware or interested in the internet at the time.
ISDN was seen as a network of its own, with digital telephony, telefax, Videotex (Datex-J/BTX/T-Online Classic),
Datex-P, terminal connections and BBSes, video telephony and so on.
The internet was more of an afterthought over here.
A competing technology, X.25 (vs TCP/IP) was used by Datex-P service since 1980.
It was used by banks, universitiesor simply people who needed long distance connections without spending money on a huge phone bill.
Most BBS fans who had latests modems had no idea was this “Internetz” was all about.
It wasn’t until mid-late 90s that an awareness grew in the population.
Movies and documentaries had made people aware of it, I think.
I wished it was available over here.
Because our TV cable infrastructure is ancient and underground, we’re limited to ca. 500/50.
DOCSIS 4 isn’t possible here without replacing the amplifiers or something.
I think I remember it being the other way around – AOL bought Time Warner because Steve Case knew the internet bubble was going to pop and he didn’t want to be left owning a bunch of worthless AOL shares. He bought a good, steady, durable company and formed AOL Time Warner in the hopes that it would weather the crash and preserve his billionaire standing.
Officially a merger, although AOL stated it wanted to buy Time Warner and AOL shareholders held 55% of the new company to Time Warner’s 45%, so in practice more or less yes, AOL bought Time Warner.
Hilarious financial sodomy landing on old what’s his name?
Between that and being with Hanoi Jane, I almost felt sorry for the SOB.
AOL’s putting up that forever away message
Had AOL kept its TECHNICAL ppl (as opposed to the bean-counting creative accountants aka “managers”) they’d be offering competition to both Verizon and Comcast, but no, they milked the dialup cow ’till it was dead and then milked some more after than.
With all that much money available (buying Times Warner, heh, in which way it was related to information/communications?) they could have invested into quantum entanglement R&D and beat SkyNet/StarLink with 7G (quantum networking), but looks like bean counting is more important still. I’ll give them another 25 years before they wake up and realize what they just missed.
Funny thing about quantum entanglement that it doesn’t need satellites or extensive line-of-sight repeaters of any kinds, since it can linkup point-to-point anywhere; direct quantum dial-up if you will. Oh, AOL could have made gajillion megabucks selling licensed points-of-access, but who am I to tell them they are solidly stuck in the 1980s, profit-milking copper telephone lines “business model” of the last century. Just like Sears stubbornly continuing sending printed catalogs in the early 2000, when pretty much every dog and house spider on earth was busy auto-generating their personal web pages/portals.
Having rumbled this far, Cray, too, is no longer shining beacon of computer advancements, and is a feeble fleeting shadow of its former self. Maybe I am wrong barking the wrong tree.
Don’t quit your day job.