I guess they’re only commercial, right? I’ve tried to get them at every place I’ve lived in Atl and they’ve never been available. A lot of places you don’t even get to choose between Comcast/at$t - it’s one or the other.
Dial up was a painful period, sitting in school Monday-Friday thinking about what I'm going to surf in the weekend because that was the only time it was available for the package my parents had in 1998/1999 here in UK. Counting down the hours on Friday evening until it hits 12:00am.
Yeah. I think you got 6 hours a month (or something). One other aspect I didn’t like was when using and my hosemates picked up the phone I’d get disconnected, they’d be annoyed.
interesting, because somewhere around the time that i was able to use dialup i learned to value how i spend my time. i don't know if it had anything to do with limited dialup time. however now limited online time causes more problems because it causes me to prioritize unimportant online activities, whereas when i have unlimited online access, it is easier to prioritize important activities because i can always do the online stuff later.
I'd love to know what AOL's dial-up MAU for July 2025 was. I still remember when the first consumer v.56 modems came out. They were expensive but it felt so fast. We were living in the future.
Back in the day, I definitely knew about and correctly used the term v.90. Believe it or not, this wasn't a case of being wrong when I was young but current day brain slip - because I'm no longer all that young!
My understanding years ago was that the service was surviving off of people who thought they still needed the service to access the internet even if they had broadband or kept paying for it even if they weren’t using it. Not sure if that is true or was just speculation.
They definitely made more than a little money from this. For example, my ex–mother-in-law kept paying for AOL dial-up after she was already paying for AT&T DSL, thinking that was the only way she could keep using AOL. And yes, she would still log in through the AOL browser.
It was awful having to use AOL dialup in the UK. My parents used it (it was one of the few ISPs with freephone) so I was stuck with it. The problem was AOL routed all traffic through Virginia. For someone in the UK that meant a minimum of ~130ms ping, ruining online games and making everything super slow
For games I would have done awful things for a ping that low on dial-up. More typical for me was over 200ms. I did everything I could to tweak MTU and modem settings but could never break the 200ms barrier (that I remember).
Readit News
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...
They've also recently discontinued dialup.
My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.