Well, sounds like this is the end, guys. It was good getting to know you. I knew those 30-day free trials would run out eventually.
AOL used to setup kiosk systems at computer stores so customers could experience AOL in the store, and each store was given a login account. Long after the kiosks went down, these accounts remained active, providing those employees “in the know” with free AOL all throughout its pay-by-the-hour years.
But I only needed three more 30 day trials to finish downloading cd2 of the phantom menace cam that I started in 1999…
POV: Be a software developer. It’s 2025. You’re maintaining dialer software for an ISP. The software is written in Delphi or Visual Basic. It’s all you’ve done since 1995. You’ve got 5 years to retirement. Corporate announces end of life for dial up services.
Not too bad really, considering that software developer has milked that cow for way longer than anyone would’ve thought. Those last 5 years will be challenging though, but maybe the software developer can sprinkle some AI over their resume and magically land some weird role that nobody can explain why we need it in the first place.
Wow this is one of those instances where I’m simultaneously surprised something still exists and also find it to make a lot of sense that it still exists.
Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.
Any alternatives to the Starlink?
The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.
I read months ago that Amazon was stepping into the game but I haven’t heard anything since then.
What we really need to compete against Starlink’s network full of small satellites threatening a Kessler syndrome incident is a second network full of small satellites threatening s Kessler syndrome incident. And a third and a fourth.
Or put fiber everywhere.
Starlink satellites are in low Earth orbit. They could still cause Kessler syndrome, but aren’t as much of a concern as higher orbits.
Here are some quotes regarding this from and Aerospace America article
Regarding satellite proliferation, while there are many more satellites, the company responsible for most of them, SpaceX, places its Starlink satellites in a low orbit so they can naturally deorbit relatively soon — within five or six years, per SpaceX — if they fail.
At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell. “In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.
That’s just “the worst possible consequences won’t happen”. The danger at higher orbits is that things wouldn’t come down, and we couldn’t safely launch rockets past that orbit. That wouldn’t happen here, but destroying everything in LEO would still be pretty bad. Astronauts would likely die.
Currently, no one compares to Starlink, unfortunately. It’s really that much better. Source: FiL has been on the beta since the first constellation went up.
While not the same thing, cellular internet is not bad these days. I’ve been on T-Mobile’s internet connection for a couple years and other than CGNAT making self-hosting harder, it’s been pretty solid. This is in a rural area where we got to choose between Cable or go get fucked for high speed internet for a long time.
Kuiper and Guowang are currently launching satellites. It will probably be a few years before they are operational though.
I worked there from 2002-2005. Was 2 cubicles down from the guy responsible for sending out the “free trial!” CDs. Fun times
I still have one, still in the cellophane. I use it as a coaster.
You got more use out of it than most
Do you remember what you guys were using to burn millions of CDs at the time? Genuinely curious how it was done at that scale, as I think it was one of the biggest CD campaigns.
At that scale discs are stamped, not individually burned. Same as how music CDs and DVDs were made.
No idea. He clicked a button, they went out. I’m sure there was a big factory in China. Anytime new registrations were down for the month, send out another batch.
Imagine the shear amount of waste that guy helped put on the planet! A few spots away from a real life villain!
Oh yeah that dude made a LOT of trash. But we were working the elevator on the Death Star, man. It wasn’t his idea to do it, just his job to execute it. I suppose he could have refused to do it on principle, but they’d have another person hired within an hour. Ethics and values rarely put a roof over your head, though. AOL was the biggest employer in the area and their executive suite was ruthless. Blame them, not the guy clicking the button.
GET OFF THE INTERNET! I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!
Ok, mum! Let me just upload my geocities site.
Wow. I didn’t know that dial up was still a thing in the US
Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.
Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.
Understanding this joke makes me feel old.
Deep cut appreciated and approved of.
… In the U.S., for instance, the latest government census data indicates approximately a quarter of a million remaining dial-up holdouts.
One of the natural successors for internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places is satellite, with around eight million subscribers in the U.S. …
…and a similar disparity in cost.
TIL AOL still exists.
Me too!
(obscure reference time)
Rip my pcmcia modem card 😭
Telephony still exists! It’s still good, it’s still good!
AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.
Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?
AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.
…I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still… why?
I actually had no idea that Firefox only exists because of AOL (The Mozilla Browser evolved into Firefox for those not in the know). Thanks for sharing that interesting bit of history.
They actually didn’t; the timeline is off. Mozilla was spun off as an open source version of Netscape Navigator in January 1998. Netscape was acquired by AOL in November.
Jamie Zawinski, who had been a major proponent of open sourcing it within Netscape, was a critic of the merger.
To be pedantic there really wasn’t a standalone browser, it was the Netscape (later Mozilla) suite which was browser email WYSIWYG HTML editor and an irc client. Firefox, then called Firebird, was them fully decoupling it from the suite.
Also that’s why the email client is called Thunderbird, it was meant to be a separate but complimentary program to Firebird.
The pedantic part is that it wasn’t an evolution. The suite never died, it’s still around. They have a shared Netscape/Mozilla Suite ancestor. It’s called SeaMonkey.
YOU’VE GOT MAIL!
Your mailbox is full!
That’s not what I wanted, hew-man!
I thought we all had a collective and unsaid agreement not to talk about this one
Statute of limitations ran out.
Goodbye!
i miss the red dragon inn </3
LORD is still out there if you look. I think they have leaderboards under a new name
It’s a really fun drinking boardgame game now.
What’s that?
it one an rp chatroom on aol were i had my first taste of d&d and larp back in the day
https://anarkeith.blogspot.com/2011/10/legacy-of-red-dragon-inn.html?m=1
https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7bq0ov/the_red_dragon_inn_aol_chatroom/
Nice, thanks for the explanation!
FFS will people ever use “it’s” and “its” correctly ?
Look, just because your one of the people who understands it, doesn’t mean their one of the ones who do.
I would of got it right
wood have
Sigh
This comment hurt
This comment hertz
Eye twitch at intentionally wrong use of they’re/their/there
Your instead of you’re.
Also that
“Could of” and similar phonetic replacements making no sense whatsoever irritate me more.
Here at least the logic is arbitrary, “Anna’s apartment” and “school’s leadership” vs “Anna’s waiting” and “school’s empty”, but “its tail” vs “it’s cold”.
OK, I’m not a native speaker as it may be clear.
Fwiw, the logic is, “its” isn’t quite the equivalent of “Anna’s” or “school’s.”
Rather it’s the equivalent of “his,” “hers,” and “theirs.” Also “mine” but that’s just irregular af. In other words, possessive pronouns don’t take an apostrophe while possessive nouns do.
It’s not a LOT of logic, a pretty shaky ladder, but there it is. 0
(Oh, and for both nouns and pronouns, position in the sentence makes a difference whether to use a contraction at all, or go with the separate “is.” But that’s a horse of a different color!)
The one that kills me is the positive use of “anymore,” which I’ve come to learn is colloquial to Northern Ireland and the midwest US, but good lord it just doesn’t sound right when people say stuff like “everybody’s cool anymore” instead of “everybody’s cool now.” For some reason I felt like it was becoming more common but now I’m thinking it might just be my exposure to midwest.social.
Huh; never heard that use, before. Sounds incredibly wrong to be, as well.
My autocorrect always tries to correct “its” to it’s" no matter the context
Same. But that shouldn’t be a factor in a professional publication.
It’s not are fault, it’s the school’s!
Yeah its so annoying when someone uses the wrong one
Oh you.
First, could be autocorrect, and second: How many languages do you speak FFS?
