One of the earliest consumer internet options, AOL’s dial-up service was once the most common way for people to access the early web.
Goodbye
With AOL’s exit from dial-up, we are now down to three dial-up ISPs; NetZero, Juno and DSLExtreme.
As a worldnet user old school Juno always had this mystic. AOL was always a blind spot though.
Get off the phone!
Ah man I am saddened by this. I first got on the internet in 1997 at my house on a 14.4k modem using AOL. In 2001 I got cable internet and still used AOL a little. My career now is because learning to code by reading code from AOL Progs in Visual Basic 3.0. Fuck Steve Case!
Steve Case!
Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
A long time.
While I hated AOL for reasons, this is the end of an era. RIP
AOL will be remembered more fondly for things like this. But, nobody ever has a fond memory of the software AOL shoved out. It was clampware, unreliable and frequently crashed.
The early vibe coders.
But they gave out nice coasters
Before that, they gave out floppy disks. You could tape over the write protect hole and reuse them.
But they were 720k. Barely usable
They were free and not everything needs 1.44MB.
You could punch a hole in the corner and double the capacity 😁
You couldn’t flip a 3.5in floppy
You didn’t need to flip it, 3.5" readers could already read both sides, but the hole or lack of is what told them whether both sides were available. I’ve done it myself.
https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-remember-the-floppy-disk-punch-notcher/
Eh…I wouldn’t call them “nice”. They were ok. Wouldn’t put them on a nice table.
o7
Fuck AOL they killed CompuServe.
Someone else remembers CompuServe?!
Back when your email address and username were: 583947690@compuserve.com
Good times!
I loved CompuServe, back in the day.
And Prodigy.
Mad Maze…
Oh my god that’s the funky shit.
Good night, sweet prince.
Alternatively
Several minutes of randomly pitched screeches
Random!? You just don’t speak computer!
Oh stewardess; I speak modem.
Eeee eooooooo bong bong scrrrrrr
Today is October 1, 1993.
September is over.
You can finally wake me up
The September that lasted 32 years…
Alas, the damage is done and there’s no going back.
So, when the last wagon wheel factory closed down, where there nostalgia pieces in the papers?
I guess not, I just searched and there are still a bunch of places making the wheels.Where am I going to get hand crafted dial up though
The Serial Port has some content that may scratch that itch.
Gimme 20 bucks and I’ll come over and screech dialup noises at you while you browse.
Since there are still horse drawn wagons around there are also still manufacturers for wagon wheels. But there were several opinion pieces in newspapers whenever a new technology took over. I’m sure you can find plenty for the time when cars became mainstream.
With a robot beep It dialed one one ooh With a final screech It dialed one one ooh One one oh!
