in Dev Tools (which you get to by pressing F12) in Chrome and probably Edge, used for debugging, and also simulating other devices on your development PC, there is an option to “Throttle Network” so that web developers can make sure their app works under slow network conditions. Unfortunately “dial up” is not a pre-loaded setting for throttling. It allows you to enter a “custom” throttle setting and enter the kb/s, presumably allowing a very small number.
I once had someone on the street try to sell me an AOL disk as a “valuable program”. When I told him that those things were free, he smiled sheepishly and walked away. I give him credit for the effort.
Yeah, tried it myself with a DL speed of 56 kb, upload of 33 kb, and latency of 100 ms. Hacker News was fine, as expected. I gave up on the front page of the SDMB after about 90 seconds.
Tried them all with Chrome network throttling and they’re fine. Often faster than the full-blown site with gigabit internet. Sorta tempted to make some of these my primary sites…
I had dial-up internet as recently as 2007 as I had no alternative in the rural area of Arkansas I resided in at the time. I will admit to being mildly surprised AOL still had dial-up services though. Mainly because I thought AOL stopped being an internet provider years ago.
I used dialup at home as late as 2004 but in metro Milwaukee. I was an college student living off campus, the school had a local dialup number, and my roommate had a landline. I spent a lot of time at school so had access to the highspeed there but all dialup at home for that school year. I used a lot of low bandwidth message boards like this one back then.
And AOL Instant Messenger.
Edit: one roommate was planning her desintation wedding at the time and used my laptop and connection for researching, price quotes, etc. That must have sucked mightily. At least she had a cell phone, I didn’t yet.
I remember reading the Usenet on AoL, and it wouldn’t display a text-heavy post because its size had exceeded the buffer. That’s when I realized it was AoCRAP.
My ISP still provides dialup connectivity. The last time I tried to use it for anything, it was impractically slow for anything except fetching email with my email program. Everything “web” is now coded with cumbersome fancy page code that brings 56K dialup to its knees.
AOL dialup was my first home internet access, and I used up until at least 2007 or 2008. By that time I don’t think there was anything AOL-specific I used besides mail; aside from that, it was just a way to get to the WWW.
The slow speed was one drawback. The other was that I couldn’t make or receive phone calls while I was online.
Almost all places (houses and apartments) are wired for at least two landlines, and they weren’t very expensive back in the day (like $10-20/mo). Definitely worth it before cell phones eliminated the need.
When I was in college (late 90s) we actually got three lines, and a Diamond Shotgun modem. Somehow our ISP didn’t care that we were connected on two lines 100% of the time (we used an automatic re-dialer program). We shared the whopping 112 kb/s connection across 4 roommates, but even at that it was pretty good for the time. Nearly ISDN speeds.
Anyone here ever use Juno? I still wonder if I (or my now nine years deceased wife) still have active email accounts there; no possible way I could ever resurrect our passwords.
In 2022 0.1% of households relied on dialup. That works out to about 130,000 households. I’m a little surprised that AOL can’t continue to make a profit off that market.
How do rural householders access the internet now? I’m guessing smartphone. I see that satellite costs $40-$60 per month.
