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.
AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day
Submitted 1 day ago by fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
Ronno@feddit.nl 9 hours ago
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.
rozodru@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
back in the early 00s I used to do AOL tech support. Even then a lot of people were on cable or DSL. Vast majority of calls we got were from people out in the boonies or the elderly so it doesn’t surprise me that there are still a good chunk of people on dialup.
Actually by that point most of our calls weren’t even for Dial Up. the thing with AOL support back then was if the user also had other computer issues unrelated to AOL that they brought up while on the line with us we HAD to address them and try to do support for it. Callers would discover this fact and use AOL tech support as a defacto go to tech support for ALL computer issues. They’d start off with some random easy to fix (they knew how to fix) dialup issue and then would say “oh wow you fixed it, I wish you could also help me with this problem I’ve been having for awhile with…” and yup, we’d roll our eyes and say “oh, what what’s wrong?” A good chunk of my calls, believe it or not, would be for printer issues.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
Hell, I’m sure there are still some places that only have dialup.
popekingjoe@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I worked there from 2002-2005. Was 2 cubicles down from the guy responsible for sending out the “free trial!” CDs. Fun times
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I still have one, still in the cellophane. I use it as a coaster.
WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
You got more use out of it than most
vinnymac@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
At that scale discs are stamped, not individually burned. Same as how music CDs and DVDs were made.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
happydoors@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Imagine the shear amount of waste that guy helped put on the planet! A few spots away from a real life villain!
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
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.
viking@infosec.pub 9 hours ago
Oh wow, dial-up in Germany died 20+ years ago. I’m surprised that’s still a thing. Well, was. But until now is really staggering. I wonder what you could even still do over such a connection, considering that even messenger services and email now use 3-5MB just completing the server handshake.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/
And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there’s nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.
In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.
In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.
The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn’t been in a long time. But that’s the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.
Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven’t updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
Just over the weekend I browsed trough my old blog (yes, those were a thing too) to check which year I did some remodeling on our house and stumbled on a note where I complained about slow 3G connection about 10 years ago. Compared to traditional dial-up that’s still orders of magnitude faster(~10/1Mbps back then on our location) but on a snowy day (with severe packet loss) it apparently took 10 minutes to get Skype and XMPP to even log in and over a minute to get SSH session open.
I suppose you can just barely get email trough today and even then you better not be in a hurry.
vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
GET OFF THE INTERNET! I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!
Ok, mum! Let me just upload my geocities site.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 16 hours ago
TIL AOL still exists.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Me too!
(obscure reference time)
TheThrillOfTime@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
I miss the old internet.
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 15 hours ago
Understanding this joke makes me feel old.
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Deep cut appreciated and approved of.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
i miss the red dragon inn
Patches@ttrpg.network 3 hours ago
It’s a really fun drinking boardgame game now.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
What’s that?
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
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/
kinther@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
LORD is still out there if you look. I think they have leaderboards under a new name
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
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?
Psythik@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I actually had no idea that Firefox only exists because of AOL. Thanks for sharing that interesting bit of history.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
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.
db2@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
To be pedantic there really wasn’t a standalone browser, it was the Netscape (then 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.
medem@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
FFS will people ever use “it’s” and “its” correctly ?
ramble81@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Look, just because your one of the people who understands it, doesn’t mean their one of the ones who do.
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Eye twitch at intentionally wrong use of they’re/their/there
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
“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.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
(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!)
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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”
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
It’s not are fault, it’s the school’s!
Devmapall@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
My autocorrect always tries to correct “its” to it’s" no matter the context
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Same. But that shouldn’t be a factor in a professional publication.
jfrnz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah its so annoying when someone uses the wrong one
Reference4054@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Oh you.
wischi@programming.dev 1 day ago
First, could be autocorrect, and second: How many languages do you speak FFS?
mrddu3at2@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Rip my pcmcia modem card 😭
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Telephony still exists! It’s still good, it’s still good!
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
AOL was dead to me the day they dropped support for Neverwinter Nights.
Zachariah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
… 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. …
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 1 day ago
…and a similar disparity in cost.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Goodbye!
kamenlady@lemmy.world 1 day ago
YOU’VE GOT MAIL!
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Your mailbox is full!
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 1 day ago
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I thought we all had a collective and unsaid agreement not to talk about this one
phillycodehound@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Wow 34 Years of Dialup. Who still uses dial up? I guess that naive of me and is coming from a place of privelege.
But still dial up??!
Dearth@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
If you live in a rural area, it seems plausible
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 19 hours ago
Even simple pages are now at least 1-2MB big. News pages without an ad blocker and Autoplay videos can easily try to download 10 or more MB per page load. On 56kbits dial up, 10MB will take about 25 mins in the best case.
phillycodehound@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Yea I guess so. Man that must be difficult.
AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Up until probably about a decade ago I would occasionally go into small shops that used dial up to process credit card payments. There may still be some places doing that but I haven’t noticed it in a while.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 1 day ago
AOL… America Offline
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 1 day ago
After it is debut?
realitista@lemmus.org 1 day ago
Ah the USR sportster. An ubiquitous workhorse of the early '90s
PattyMcB@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No more free AOL disks? AWWWW
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What?
Lucelu2@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Wow. I didn’t know that dial up was still a thing in the US
Patches@ttrpg.network 4 hours ago
Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.
Imagine getting dial up in the year of our lord, paying by the minute.