Is AOL dial-up like the “Abe Vigoda of technologies”? Show of hands, who here is surprised to learn that was actually still around. My hand is raised.
I still have AOL mail. Little to no spam because most don’t even think it still exists.
I mean, I knew AOL as a company still existed in some form, so I’m not too surprised that their email service still exists. I just had no idea they still offered dial-up.
My brother has had the same AOL email account for decades now, and he’s been complaining that AOL considers servicing their legacy accounts an annoyance.
I “knew” that AOL still had dial-up accounts in that every once in a while I’d hear someone say “Hey, did you know…” or as a piece of tech trivia. But it’s not as though it comes up often so, if you had asked me today, it’d still have been a coin flip if it was still offered since last time I heard about it.
But! But I’m almost done downloading that flash game from 1998!
I signed on to AOL on July 17, 1994. No internet in a sense, just their services locked behind a paywall. I found the Straight Dope “Big Brain” AOL section at some point on AOL and this how I ended up here.
We beta-tested their new versions for awhile.
The WWW is much better, but AOL had a very fun and cute smallness to it.
As an aside, is there a thread about all the things made out of the multitude of AOL disks given away everywhere?
I literally did check the time/date of the first post as I was sure it was some zombie resurrection. I guess not.
You know, I was slightly annoyed when they switched from floppy disks to CDs. At least you could erase the floppies and reuse them. I got so many free floppy disks that way!
I asked on this forum years ago not about the internet, but about the AOL stuff. You know, the stuff that you use keywords to view. It wasn’t on the WWW, but was “sites” or “hubs” that you could view.
Did that continue to today? Or is that stuff gone and if so, when?
I just realized AOL dial-up actually outlasted Elwood Edwards, the man who recorded the iconic “Welcome!”, “You’ve got mail”, and other phrases, by nearly a year.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/08/nx-s1-5183836/elwood-edwards-aol-youve-got-mail-dies
It was AOL that introduced me to Cecil’s brain and the Straight Dope. I used it from 1996 to approximately 2004, when I basically forgot about it. I can’t remember the last time I used it. I too was astonished to learn it had kept going this long and, yes, checked the date stamp because it had to be a zombie thread.
But at least you could create cool artwork on your wall!
I am wondering what people with dial up were still able to access? At 2.5 MB, the average page size of a website in 2024, it would take 6 minutes to download at 56.6 kbps.
Even AOL email itself would be a long wait at dialup speed.
Decent bet AOL dial up also included a very simplified “walled garden” UI that resembled the ones from 1995. The ordinary 2025 WWW would be utterly useless over a 56k modem.
I raised my hand… and in so doing, knocked my dear late grandmother’s hand-made porcelain bunny collection off the self, shattering it. Tiny ears, paws, and pastel bows scattered across the carpet like ceramic shrapnel. Somewhere in the distance, I swear I heard “You’ve Got Mail” in a mocking tone. So, thanks for that! 
I am surprised AOL was still online, but I’m saddened that it’s now gone, for nostalgic reasons. It harkens back to the giddy days of internet innocence, and a time when I still had a full head of hair.
Some sites still work that way. I checked the network log for Hacker News–it reports about 90 kB of page data, but 46 kB of that was cached and of the rest, it was text that compressed down to 7.8 kB. Which would be perfectly usable on a 56k modem. Probably 1.5 s for a page load considering overhead (and that you rarely connect at exactly 56k).
An average SDMB page looks to be around 150 kB compressed (with a lot more that’s cached). That’s a little crappy and would take 20-30 s to load on 56k. There isn’t 150 kB of useful text on the page, so most of that is embedded scripting or other overhead.
For the rest of the web, just turning off videos/images would be a good start. Possibly AOL could offer a service where images were downsampled on the server side. And much of the bloat in pages has come from giant Javascript libraries, but those mostly get cached.
Is there a way to artificially throttle down Internet speed to see what would work and what wouldn’t at dialup speed?