The last time I used a dial-up modem, some time came around 2001. Within a few years, the dial-up had excluded my life, never to return. I have not even done a telephone line in my home for most of my adult life.
But I still feel a strong tingling of sadness to know that AOL is Finally retiring The Ol ‘Hobihors. In late September, it is gone. The timeline is almost Nose fitting: The broader access to the service of Internet AOL brought in the 1990s is related to a digital incident called eternal September. Before AOL allowed extensive access to USENET – a pioneer for today’s online discussion forums – most new users appeared in every september, when new college students often joined the stage. Thanks to AOL, they began to start from daily around September 1993.
The fact that the dial-up of AOL is still active in the first place, highlights a trew of technology: sometimes, the vital accessories are well glued after becoming obsolete.
Why Aol is now dialing up
It is no surprise that dial-up is close to a quarter century. Despite not requiring the dial-up modem itself since the summer of 2001, I was once so emotional about dial-up that I begged to get a modem for my 13th birthday. It is difficult to shake the modem, and not just because we are waiting for them for so long to do our work.
Originally, the telephone modem was a hack. It was pushed into public consciousness Partially by deaf users Who worked to develop the monopoly rules of the phone industry TeletypewriterA system to communicate on the phone lines through the text. The way the community invented technologies like acoustic coupler.
To create that hack function, the modem had to make several conversions in real time – from data to audio and again, in two directions. As i put it in a piece Comparison of modem with telegraph,
The modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating the information into a rural signal, then in the present, then back into an Aural signal, then once again back into the data, modulation and demodulation is running that is similar to the process used with the original telegraph, although manually.
Such models from US robotics work in audio and back to return. Jhphill19/wikimedia common
Along with the telegraph, the information was input by an individual, translated into electric pulses, and obtained by another person. Modem works in the same way, just without human translators.
The result of all this was that the modem had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to do all this work. The need to connect through a medium made for audio meant that the data was at risk of losing on the line. (so error correction The modem had an essential part of the development; Often the data needs to be shared more than once to ensure that it is done. Without error correction, dial-up modem will also be slow.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUDJJUU9NHS Remember that sound? It acquired the first experience of many users online.Adventuresinhd/YouTube
Telephone lines were a highly disabled system for data as they were created for voice and heavy compressed audio. The voices are clear and recognizable even after being compressed, but the audio compression can wreak havoc on data connections.
In addition, there was a problem of line access. With a call, you could not easily share a connection. This means that you cannot make a phone call when using dial-up, due to which some homes are getting another line. And at the Internet service provider level, many lines became very complicated, becoming very fast.
The phone industry knew this, But its initial solution, ISDNDid not leave the mainstream consumers. (Later, one, DSL, had a better performance in, and possibly one of the few internet options that rural users currently have.)
In some regions of the United States, dial-up remains the best option-the result of poor investment in the infrastructure of Internet.
So the industry went to other solutions to get consumers to get internet -coxial cable, which was already wider due to cable TV and fiber, which was not. The problem is that Kox never reached enough, as far as telephone wires did, because cable television was not technically a utility in electricity or water manner.
In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify Internet access as a public utilityAlthough the most recent was one A appeal killed by the court earlier this year. Public utility regulation is important. The telephone struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and did it only after a series of rules. One who led the creation Among the Federal Communications Commission, it was placed under influence. So there was electricity, which A dedicated law was required To expand its access.
But the reach of broadband is disappointingly incomplete, as revealed by the fact that many areas of the country have not been properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires can be a very difficult task, in part, because companies that sell fibers, like, Verizon And Google, often stops investing due to high cost. (However, for Google’s credit, It started expanding again in 2022 After six years of rollback.)
Therefore, in some regions of the United States, dial-up remains the best option-the result of poor investment of decades in the infrastructure of internet. This, over the years, has carried forward companies such as AOL, which has developed several times as it merged with a quarter century ago with a time warner.
The first PC-based client graphical operating system called America online appeared on Geown. This screenshot shows the DOS AOL client that was distributed with Geoworks 2.01.Eri smith
But AOL is not the company that it was. After several acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now the only subsidiary of Yahoo, and it was a web-first property transition long ago. Oh, it’s still MembershipBut they are effectively fancy analogs for unnecessary safety software. And his email client, while years ago, was defeated by Gmail’s choice, there are still fans.
When I posted an AOL news on social media, about 90 percent of the reactions were the real notes of jokes or honors. But there was a small contingent, perhaps 5 percent, in which it was talked about how much it was going to screw on far-flung communities. I do not think it is the responsibility of AOL to continue this model forever.
Instead, it seems that the job is about to fall for two companies: Microsoft, whose MSN dial-up internet access Costs $ 179.95 per year, and company United online onlineWhich still operates dial-up players for a long time Juno and Netzero. Satellite internet is also an option, with old services like Hughesnet and new people like Starlinks.
This is not the fault of AOL. But AOL is the face of this failure.
AOL dropping dial-up is part of a long feedout
As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not long been as a modem telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But modem, first used in 1958 Part of a air defense systemA good 67 years have been stuck all around. It is still one of the oldest pieces of computer -related technology in modern use.
To guess how old you are: 1958 is also the year integrated circuitAn essential building block of any modern computer was invented. Disk plaater, which became modern hard driveInvented a year ago. Floppy disk Came a decade later.
(It should be noted that the modem itself is not dying – there is one in your smartphone – but your landline connection is from your modem, really loud, see better days.)
The news that leaves its service can be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the Telegram indicates that it may not be the case. In 2006, a lot of grass was made about Western Union is sending its last telegramBut the Western Union was never the only company to send telegram, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram International wire In 2025. (This is not cheap: the same message, the same day sent, $ 34, plus 75 cents per word.)
In many ways, leaving the AOL service is a sign that it is already a case of niche use more niche. But there is a way to be relevant in cases of niche users in view of the right audience. This is such that the doctors keep using the pager. As A planet money episode From two years ago notedIn addition to using the pages, friction worked well with the way doctors acted, as they ensured that they knew that they were not competing with something else that they were receiving.
The possibility of dial-up is never going to die completely, until the landline phone system itself is made offline, Which AT & T has acceptedIt is one of the cheapest options to get online, drinking a single coffee in a panra and out of the logging on WiFi.
But AOL? While dial-up can be the primary business of the company first in its life, it has not really noticed it in a long time. AOL is now a high diverse company, which has been advertised primary attention in the last 15 years. It still sells membership, but those membership is going to lose its most important heritage feature.
AOL is very weak only to support the next generation of internet service. His inroad time warner for broadband was considered a cable; It did not work, so he picked up something else, but placed around the heritage business, while it was still profitable. It is likely that emerging technologies, such as Microsoft’s Air Band InitiativeWhich depends on distributing broadband on the unused “white space” on television dial, creates a better shot. 5G connectivity will also improve over time (T-Mobile) Already promotes its 5G home internet As a rural option), and perhaps more satellite-based options will be revealed.
Technologies do not die. They gradually become so irrelevant that they can die.
Monoculture of AOL Login Experience
When I posted the announcement, hidden in a vague link on the AOL website sent to me by a colleague, it immediately went viral on Blussky and Mastodon.
This means that I got to see a lot of people reacting to this news in real time. Most had only one comment: I didn’t even know that it was still around. Others talked about modem jokes, or AOL’s famous Terrible customer serviceInterestingly, most people said about the same thing about service.
This is not the case with most online experiences that usually reflect innumerable points of ideas. I think it talks to the fact that when the Internet was the last monoculture killer, the experience of being online for the first time was largely monocultural. Typically, it began with a modem connecting to a phone number and leaving us in a familiar location.
We have lost a lot of internet service providers over the years. Some people spark the passion and memories of America online, a network that defeats more innovative and more established players in any way, which all good and evils represent the information for all good and evil for information superheave.
AOL should be embarrassed by that history. It also announced its shutdown.
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