AOL Finally Discontinues Its Dial-Up Internet Access - After 34 Years (pcmag.com) 75
AOL (now a Yahoo subsidiary) just announced its dial-up internet service will be discontinued at the end of September.
"The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.")
AOL's dial-up service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware. But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started "as a very early Apple service." AOL itself started back in 1983 under the name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985, eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet.
In the 1990s AOL "was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the 2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly, it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time." In the 2021 acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the Internet age.
"This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts." AOL's disastrous 2001 merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later, Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management....
The demise of AOL's dial-up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year.
That was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by 100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries); and 1,445,135 via "other service."
The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in those 2023 estimates.
"The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.")
AOL's dial-up service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware. But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started "as a very early Apple service." AOL itself started back in 1983 under the name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985, eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet.
In the 1990s AOL "was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the 2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly, it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time." In the 2021 acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the Internet age.
"This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts." AOL's disastrous 2001 merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later, Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management....
The demise of AOL's dial-up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year.
That was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by 100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries); and 1,445,135 via "other service."
The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in those 2023 estimates.
No thx (Score:3)
AOL - not even once! They had weird chat filters and just an all around slow, terrible service.
Re: No thx (Score:3)
Their install CD's made nice coasters tho!
Re: No thx (Score:5, Funny)
Their install CD's made nice coasters tho!
Sometimes one will drop to the floor when I shower. I dont even know where they're coming from.
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Better of the only two jokes on the target-rich story.
If I ever had a mod point to bestow would that motivate me to search for funny-but-not-yet-so-moderated stuff?
Re: No thx (Score:5, Funny)
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This led to my having to ask for a replacement windows CD from the university. It's not like I used it more than a time or two ago. year, being on FreeBSD, but sometimes it was needed for some screwball stuff.
I'd looked high and low before giving up and asking. It isn't a big deal, as the university had a master licensee, but still.
And then, a few months later, I found it.
My fire had put it into coaster duty!
Err, why?
"well you said . . ."
[eyeroll]
the tech guy and I got a good laugh out of it, though.
Re: No thx (Score:1)
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I started with The Source [wikipedia.org] before moving to CompuServe. I also worked at Soft Warehouse before they rebranded to CompUSA. Ah, the memories...
Prompt $p$g
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> 'Their install CD's made nice coasters tho!'
I always preferred using the PC's cupholder for that. Just push the button and it slides out. Very convenient. Kinda fragile tho; I've broken several of them.
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Their install CD's made nice coasters tho!
I knew a person that used free CDs sent through the mail to make some pretty cool art. He'd shatter them, lay them on a board in pretty patterns overlaying each other, then cover them in clear resin. When finished, he'd install LED lights of different colors on each side of the resin and you'd get reflections based on which direction the shattered CD parts were laying. Honestly, as abstract as some of them were, it was probably a better use for them than installing the crapware that came on them. And saved
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My young kids used to play with them as toys. They discovered that, when placed on a window pane, they would "stick" to the window, and could be moved around on the surface. They thought this was fun. We were happy they found something interesting to do with the discs!
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Once you connected you could just open up IE and do whatever you wanted. Many didnt know that. Didn't have to use the aol client.
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I would suspect it wasn't always the case, not in 1985 or 1989 when they renamed to AOL anyway.
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You didn't try it even once? How did you know about the "weird chat filters" and slow, terrible service?
As a former customer, they were ahead of their time in many ways. They were the first major Window-native online service; i.e., the first that wasn't strictly text-based.
They were also a good place to find software, much better than other shareware sites at the time.
Competitors (Score:5, Informative)
There are still dial-up services available:
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No, the LM1200 is the 4G LTE model, which is why it's so cheap, and the plan I linked likewise is fine on 4G devices.
128kbit isn't 5G speeds, it's barely more than double 56kbit dialup.
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That requires a 5G tower, which would not be available to rural customers
Oddly enough, it is, at least here in PA. A lot of towers have gone up in recent years in the cellular buildup, and if you are in a rural village and nearby, you probably have 5G. So if you are in the wilderness areas, where the population is less than one per square Kilometer, you won't have dialup or cell service, then you have to look at things like StarLink and have some method of generating power for your computer.
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Many rural areas still have absolutely 0 bars of T-Mobile service. Musk didn't launch Starlink just because he enjoys playing with rockets.
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ELNK is still around but they discontinued dial-up in 2024
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I still sell Dialup, yes actively sell it. We don't have many dialup customers but in rural Michigan even Starlink can be a problem to use, if it is even available to you..
Average speed on the crappy (aka rotting) lines here tops out around 32K. Too many line-share's, bridge taps, and outdated Remote Terminals (Teleco lingo for Multiplexing, Wire tap boards, and Local area control systems).
Unfortunately because of the way the system is set up it only works in our state, and even then if you happen to di
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Does anybody still run a BBS that connects to dial-up?
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Yes! Check out https://www.telnetbbsguide.com... [telnetbbsguide.com]
Most are available only over telnet, but a few dozen still maintain dedicated dial-in phone numbers:
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com... [telnetbbsguide.com]
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NO INTERNET SERVICES for 35 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, in 1991 AOL didn't offer "Internet" services. They offererd dialup to their own walled garden "Keyword: AOLSUX".
It took two more years -- until 1993 -- when AOL's free coasters allowed you to connect to the real Internet. That was after Netscape beat them to it.
Revise history all you want. AOL wanted to be the next Compuserve and had no desire to link people outside their keyword sales garden.
It's now 31 years not 34 years. All they offered was dialup access to their non-artfully created stuff.
AOL was like Geocities only worse... if that's possible. Even their tagline was crappy grammar: "You've got mail." No, "you have mail." But you didn't. Because nobody outside AOL could email you until 1993.
Re:NO INTERNET SERVICES for 35 years (Score:4, Interesting)
AOL was like Geocities only worse... if that's possible. Even their tagline was crappy grammar: "You've got mail." No, "you have mail." But you didn't. Because nobody outside AOL could email you until 1993.
Meh. First big mover and all that. So what if it took them two years? For many years after that, they were the 900 lb gorilla of low end internet access.
I moved around a lot being in the military. One thing I could be sure of anywhere was being able to spin up AOL internet access. They were the McDonald's of the internet, for good or bad.
Re:NO INTERNET SERVICES for 35 years (Score:4, Informative)
I enjoyed your remarks.
You are exactly right, and so was gavron that you responded to.
You two obviously experienced those years first hand, and so did I. Remarks in this thread make me wonder how many of the commenters did not, and are measuring an older era with modern yardsticks.
Back then, those dial-up services were the only means of online or "e-community" access for nearly everyone who was not a computer whiz.
In the early 90's, most people did not have a home computer. For those that did, online connections were not standard. You had to buy and install a modem or internal card. You had to dial up to a local BBS or to CompuServe, and then AOL and similar wannabes.
Unless you were in CS or something techy at a university, you had no clue about the "internet".
In the early 90's, "democratizing" things that opened up computers to ordinary non-tech people were things like the 386 processor and its mate Windows 3.1 which exposed many ordinary non-tech people, via their computers at work, to using a computer on user-friendlier terms; and, AOL and it mass-marketing, which exposed users to connectivity with other users. AOL was not as sophisticated or rich with information as CompuServe, as I recall, but CompuServe never matured, then took a dump when bought by H&R Block (if I recall correctly), whereas AOL had the vision to expand and become the everyman service. The Time-Warner merger seemed to kill it because it was then unable to respond to evolving technology, but no one can discount its influence in those years circa 1995 - 2000.
What some comments in this thread seem to miss is that before there was an internet, there was dial-up. That was the best tech of the times. For those who learned to connect, it was with phone, modem, and CompuServe or AOL.
When Netscape and the World Wide Web came along, that was another revolutionary and democratizing event, a user friendly and widely marketed form of usenet-gopher-archie-ftp-etc., and later of Mosaic, none of which were everyman user-friendly and easy-to-access. They opened up the internet to ordinary people, and in turn spurred the need for high speed access which ultimately trivialized slow speed dial-up.
But, for users circa 1985-1990 to 1995-2000, dial-up to BBS, CompuServe, AOL, Genie was the only option - that was the standard technology. The internet and Netscape (then IE, etc.) were the newfangled technologies. Remember, once you are comfortable with a certain set of tools and workflow, newer and better technologies can take time to adopt or switch over or incorporate into your hearts and business. New users with no prior experience or allegiances are more likely to readily adopt the new technologies. People who grew up from the start with cable-dsl-broadband, Netscape-IE-Firefox, etc., www versus usenet, etc., they are now in their 20's and 30's.
Some comments in this thread seem to reflect that perspective, which is fair. But back then, as many of us remember so well, those modems and dial-up services, including AOL, for all its deficiencies as seen from a modern perspective, were revolutionary and glamorous. Horses and buggies would be glamorous to bare-footed troglodytes, and gas lamps and lamp lighters would seem thoroughly modern to candle dippers. You can't judge older technologies by today's standards. For those years back in the 90's, AOL, using the available tech of the times, and a technology people already had in their homes, the telephone, was a potent force to get people familiar with computers and connectivity. By building a market and money, it spurred the need and means for better faster tech - and here we are today.
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Eternal September (Score:2)
There's a certain irony to AOL dial-up being shut down in September, given they gave rise to the September that never ended.
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What kind of weird ass place starts the school year in September and not at the start of the year?!
It's not that school started in September, it's that by September all the students had finally figured out where things were well enough to be a problem. It took a few weeks, or at least days, to get things rolling. Then it took about a month for the novelty to wear off and/or the students to learn what's what.
I was watching a podcast recently where the host commented that he took his son to university recently, which implies to me that the start of the semester for him was August 4th, or maybe starts on
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Where I live (California), non-University schools always started after Labor Day in September in the 80s and early 90s. They've all been creeping earlier and earlier and are all in August now, generally the middle of August now. But that was absolutely unheard of for a high school (or middle or elementary) in the 1980s.
I think Universities have always had somewhat different schedules, but I suspect a lot more of them started in September back then too.
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The start of the school year in the fall in western societies probably has a lot to do with the summer holiday where students are usually off for several months during the summer. Unless you did bad in the prior school year and need to attend summer school to make up classes that you failed.
The history of school not being in session for the summer has a lot to do with how children were needed to work on family farms. School would typically start after the harvest was in, and then end when it was time for spring planting. In between planting and harvesting they'd be needed for pulling weeds, building/mending/painting fences and other "while the sun shines" work, as well as work on managing young livestock as spring would be when most horses and cattle would be giving birth.
I did a search on w
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Technically, September ended in 2005 when AOL shut down their USENET servers. But it was already dead.
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Technically, September ended in 2005 when AOL shut down their USENET servers. But it was already dead.
It was the start of non-techies taking over discussion the internet, and that truly has never ended.
I know this sort of comment is di rigueur... (Score:2)
But, in all seriousness, I thought AOL had shut their dial-up services down long ago - so this story surprised me.
AOL's mergers had a pattern (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely, but if they IPO... (Score:3)
There was a decent "History of AOL" book a while back, which indicated that once AOL started accepting partners into their walled garden, those partners were generally able to IPO on that fact alone.
Hence, AOL didn't care about the companies they merged with, so long as they got their cut of the IPO. Also, post-IPO, they didn't care what happened to the company, because the quick/easy money had been made.
So you're right, but one can tease out SOME logic, anyway.
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56 kbps modem? Count yourself lucky (Score:2)
We had only 14,400 bps modems, and our Da' would thrash us to within an inch of our lives for watching porn.
You had it rich, we had only 1200/75 modems, and had to peer at porn GIFs through a magnifying glass.
We had it tough - our modem was a 300 bps acoustic coupler, and our porn was overprinted on 14"x11" line-flow paper.
Tell that to the kids these days and they'd never believe you.
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You had porn gifs? We had to print out ASCII porn on the school mainframe chain printers.
Now you kids get off my lawn!
AOL was the ONLY option for Mac users... (Score:4, Interesting)
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AOL was the ONLY option for Mac users at that time around 1990. I t did have it pluses at that time. My wife still misses some of its times.... I was happy for a while with it until I realized you truly couldn't get to the WWW internet. My older brother still has AOL email.
Apple had a product called AppleLink [wikipedia.org]which they opened to end users in the late 80's. The original one was an ihouse/partner/developer system that ran on GEIS machinery, but they partnered with Quantum Computer Services and Steve Case, who was running a service for Commodore 64s. Apple beta tested AppleInk for a while, I still have my TShirt and mug. AppleLink eventually morphed into AOL and the rest is history. In 1991, STS-43 sent the first email from space using a Mac portable and AppleLink.
So in it'
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Thanks to the bundle that came with our first PC (Score:4)
I also downloaded DOOM shareware, and life was never the same
I still have one of those floppies (Score:2)
nothing like 14.4 for speed, sad how the internet killed the LAN party
just saying
And they demolished the AOL campus (Score:2)
And they demolished the entire AOL campus a couple years ago.
*sniff*
ah memories (Score:1)
Technological advancement for its time (Score:3)
As bad as AOL was, especially when viewed from the perspective of today's internet, it was many people's first experience to an online world. One of those was me. I signed up almost as soon as I heard about it, using a 14.4K modem with my Apple II+. It definitely was quirky, often unreliable, and, even then, slow as molasses but I was online. With no prior history with that sort of technology, it was pretty cool. All these years later, I can't remember how long I stayed or even what I used next (maybe att@home?) but like being there at the dawn of handheld calculators replacing the venerable slide rule, it was quite amazing.
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Apple II+ had 14.4 dial-up modems? I only remember slower like 300.
Last Zombie Accounts Close (Score:2)
Between 2015 and 2021 AOL's dial-up business declined from 1.5 million subscribers to "the low thousands" [cnbc.com]. It has been speculated that much of that residual dial-up business consisted of zombie subscriptions -- billing set up by people who were no longer competent, or even alive, but whose subscriptions were still connected to accounts that could be billed.
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still connected to accounts that could be billed.
The old AOL by Phone, AOL Voicemail, and their VoIP service (all variants of home phone services) had tens of thousands of subscriptions like this for *YEARS* after AOL stopped selling them. Since the user interface in the AOL client was long discontinued, we had to manually write text files and scripts to feed the existing back-end systems in order to bill these people.
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Incredible (Score:2)
It's incredible to think that some are still using dial-up after all this time. I hated dial up so much back in the 90's that I had an ISDN line run to my home. Sweet, sweet 128K (or 64K if I was talking on the phone at the same time).
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According to CNBC from four years [cnbc.com] ago the dial-up users numbered only in "the low thousands" then. So the number today would be... hundreds? Dozens? And this assumes that the active dial-up accounts are even being used as opposed to accounts attached to billable instruments that had just never been cancelled.
But now with dial-up shut-down it will be zero.
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It's incredible to think that some are still using dial-up after all this time. I hated dial up so much back in the 90's that I had an ISDN line run to my home.
Dial-up sucked even when most website designers assumed the majority of their viewers would be on dial-up. I hated it back in the day too, but lived somewhere where just waiting for cable to finally roll out was the only realistic option.
I would imagine the modern internet must be completely unusable over dial-up and the majority of these customers are actually just on recurring billing for something they probably don't even use.
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Yeah, I had to wait a while until DSL became available to replace my ISDN. Our local cable company monopoly never had any planes for cable Internet, so we had to wait until Spectrum came in and bought them out to replace the 50+ year old frayed coax running around town. Omni Fiber came to town a little over a year ago and wow, best technology ever, and less than half the price of everyone else with twice the speed.
Obligatory (Score:2)
{S Goodbye
Stands to reason (Score:2)
Stands to reason, because the last AOLer just "hung up".