A sad day, the lights go out at AOL
A once mighty giant is finally ending their core business, dial-up internet access. Frankly, I thought it was gone long ago
I just read in the WaPo that next month, AOL is going to shut down their dial up internet. And with that, the last vestiges of a simpler time, a more casual pace will be snuffed out.
Link (gifted)
I gotta say that at least the writer of this piece has a sense of humor:
If you’re using AOL dial-up internet to read this story, you might want to put down your can of Surge and turn off your episode of “ER.” We have some bad news.
The landline-based service, a mainstay of 1990s culture and many Americans’ first exposure to the online world, is coming to an end decades after being supplanted by broadband.
AOL, originally America Online, will discontinue its dial-up service Sept. 30, according to a terse 106-word announcement on its website.
To me, the surprising thing is that AOL still offers dial up, those rickety 33.6 or 54.2kBPS modems, screeching like a howler monkey.
I never used AOL myself, but my mother did get online with that before her house was blessed with @Home the early cable experience.
I got online before America Online was a thing, using a janky local ISP (I don't remember the first one I used, but when I upgraded circa 1997 to ISDN, it was Best internet, and I got a Unix shell, two email addresses, a /29 subnet (I think, been a ling time, but I got 4 routable IP's) and a free registration of a domain. That's where I got tralfaz.org!
But AOL was a cultural touchstone, something that many of us olds' remember with fondness.
Did you know that at one point there were 20 million subscribers? And that they had fully 50% of the internet traffic? Through their banks of modems.
Just wild.
To be honest, I was surprised that they still had the banks of modems still operational. Talk about the dark ages.
Oh well. I will be sure to pour one out for AOL.
