Mon Aug 11 21:06:16 2025 (*4cfb807c*):: https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued *** Dial-up Internet to be discontinued *** Learn about why dial up internet has been discontinued. *** help.aol.com/
(*4297a328*):: +public! https://youtu.be/D1UY7eDRXrs *** AOL (Sign On – Dial Up) *** YouTube (*097dfbf6*):: I dont know where you can get an old school copper POTS phone line anymore. I looked into it in Austin bc I wanted to try setting up a dialup terminal for kicks but no dice
(*4297a328*):: The gulag archipelago begins (*b4c3b42a*):: I think that you’re joking, but to be clear, did dial-up offer ANY kind of advantages over DSL / DOCSIS over Coax / Fiber? I used it briefly as a kid at 5 / 6 on Windows 98 / 2000, when I made my first email account with a regional internet provider that no longer exists, but we got 1-2mbps DSL and had moved to XP around the time I was like 7, I certainly don’t have memories of the culture and prestige of T1/T3 lines back then. (*b4c3b42a*):: I remember 56k connection speeds, awful latency, and getting disconnected any time someone accidentally picked up the landline; not so much w/r/t positives. (*4cfb807c*):: My family had dial up for 7 years before we got cable (*4cfb807c*):: You could dial your friends modem and play StarCraft 1v1 (*4297a328*):: Dial up was the internet before dsl so it’s kinda a peculiar question (*4297a328*):: Like… advantages? Well they both had internet (*4297a328*):: But one didnt exist (*b4c3b42a*):: “The gulag archipelago begins” implies some kind of freedom is being restricted or reduced. (*b4c3b42a*):: It’s not 1999 anymore. What freedom is being lost by the deprecation of obsolete technologies? Is the loss of widespread use of Atari partition tables a loss of freedom? (*b4c3b42a*):: I might just be overthinking a joke, but I take freedom (and the loss of it) seriously enough to be curious about whether I might be wrong in assuming so. (*4cfb807c*):: The last time I had a phone line was in 2018, by then it was ruined by robo and scam callers, its a superior format to cellular for voice calls. As far as internet access, its ideal to have multiple uplink options (*b4c3b42a*):: what modern computing can you do with a 56k connection? a MM or Slack update would take 4+ hours. (*4cfb807c*):: Idk what it has to do with gulag either, but he wasn’t joking about trying to set one up recently (*4cfb807c*):: Well irc and StarCraft would work (*4cfb807c*):: You could use Slackware and freebsd fine, dl’ing source and compiling local (*b4c3b42a*):: right, but nobody uses IRC in 2025. If you’re playing StarCraft on a modern Windows system, the background telemetry alone would use up all of your bandwidth and choke out all userspace connectivity. (*4cfb807c*):: Irc was attacked in 2019, freenode* was taken out, but people still use irc (*b4c3b42a*):: sure, just like some people still play dead MMO’s. that doesn’t make the dead MMO usably fun for the wider internet, though. (*4cfb807c*):: The maintainence costs probably supercede usage of dial up which is probably the reason for their dropping support (*b4c3b42a*):: It’s not like dialup was more censorship resistant, or more private, either, no? If anything, it was easier to tap and trivial to store all of the traffic for detailed analysis now. Sure protocol layer transport encryption might be in use, like TLS 1.2/1.3, but that’s just going to make obsolete transport links even more unusably slow, no? (*b4c3b42a*):: I am mostly just curious at the expression that loss of dialup somehow equates to loss of freedom. (*4cfb807c*):: Idk I didn’t really get that reference either, unless the removal of a even a redundant option is construed as a loss of freedom (*4cfb807c*):: I may very well have an AOL cd somewhere still, I used to shoot bb’s at the disks lol, they would mail at least one a month or quarter (*4cfb807c*):: The premise of mailing your software on a CD to potential end users is a quality biz dev anachronism (*b4c3b42a*):: IIRC a few years ago physical disk shipments *were* still an efficient bulk data transportation mechanism for hyperscaler DC’s, but that’s for moving terabytes / petabytes of data already on disk (*4cfb807c*):: Aws snowball (*4297a328*):: “No more lattes at starbucks… this is how the gulag starts” (*4297a328*):: It’s quite a funny trope if executed well (*097dfbf6*):: it’s a joke bro, good lord :joy: (*b4c3b42a*):: didn’t get the joke, my bad (*097dfbf6*):: the only reason AOL didn’t kill dialup 15 years ago is boomers dont want to switch (*097dfbf6*):: there are literally boomers right now that refuse to get anything else because they just want to check their email like they did in ’92 and thats it (*097dfbf6*):: most people are force switched off because POTS is deprecated and many of the lines are already stripped out anyway