The whole concept of "metered" dial-up was strange to me. Never experienced it thanks to my local ISP, but it was all over back in the day.

The small phone carrier where I live now, before they stopped offering dial-up, the price of $8.99 was unlimited, but I didn't know anyone who used it.

My progression from dial-up was DSL (1998 to 2001), cable (2001-2025), now fiber (2025).

I could not imagine the modern web at 56K..... the horror.... 🤣

Unknown_K wrote on 2025-08-12, 15:13:

Dialup would be pretty much useless for anything other then email these days. I used dialup provided with Prodigy (2400 baud) back when I purchased a new 286. After that I get on the internet using the local BBS (14.4K then 28K baud with a SLIP account (Rusty & Edies) and finally I went with AT&T Worldnet (56K baud) until Time Warner cable came out here with Roadrunner Cable modems around 2000.

In the waning days of usable dialup (2005-2006ish) there was an elderly neighbor of one of my relatives. I set up a POP email setup as it's the most tolerable in that situation (mail clients never seemed to do a 100% job at caching IMAP messages in my experience for offline use compared to the old POP download-and-delete approach) and the problem then was someone sending a 10mb attachment, and it clogs everything up since the POP downloading was pretty unsophisticated and would only download messages in-order. I imagine this has to be even worse now.

Email is kind of funny, just because it was grandfathered in before the days of Big Tech is why it's still accessible using standard, non-web protocols with a client of your choice. I guess IRC is there too, but videoconferencing for example, never reached critical mass in time, and devolved into webapps (at least fewer launcher.exes nowadays).

Email is kind of funny

Hippies, it were the hippies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q

Good bye,
I never used AOL back in 1990’s anyways,
I used AT&T WorldNet dial up then Cable modems.
I am still using a cable modem today. 1ghz Speeds.
I have the Option to use AT&T Fiber but I will lose my landline and fax if i Switch.
I never use them anymore anyways.
I have not received a fax in years.

Anyways my 16mhz. Motorola CPU Macintosh Color Classic and my 486 computers have network cards so I can still surf the internet
Using Netscape 3x and Microsoft I.E.

I use a WIFI Extender to connect my computer network cards to my WIFI home Network.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-08-12, 17:26:

I believe in having really good nation-level real copper wire telephone networks as a communications backbone that is independent of the internet. It's as much a matter of national security as it is having really good telephone service that isn't crappy VoIP. But no one really cares, and everyone who's in a position to make decisions is non-technical and thinks the more complex a system, the better.

It also makes me a bit uneasy. POTS while slow was basic and had very little dependency's. Proven countless times when disasters struck or even a simple blackout but telephones still worked.
But I guess with landline phones in general disappearing and even lines into building with 5G and the like I guess it was always enviable.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-12, 19:14:

The whole concept of "metered" dial-up was strange to me. Never experienced it thanks to my local ISP, but it was all over back in the day.

Don't forget if you didn't have a local line to connect to you also had AT&T charges on top of AOL's prices. It took a while for AOL and the other dialup services to have local numbers in out of the way places.

Everything new starts like that. I remember getting a cell phone back in the mid 90's and they charged you $40 or so a month after you paid retail for the phone and then they charged per minute of actual use. These days you can buy a cheap smart phone from Tracfone, get a $10 data card and tack on $50 (or whatever it is) and have unlimited talk and text for a year for nothing (they screw you on data if you don't use free Wi-Fi).

Big Pink wrote on 2025-08-11, 22:32:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-08-11, 17:34:

Dial-up becomes kind of ridiculous when the legacy telephone system doesn't even exist any more.

Arguably it ceased to exist in the 70s and 80s when the trunk lines went digital. 56K was dependent on this.

56k was actually dependent on “ringer voltage “ if you could theoretically send a digital signal beyond 56k you could blow up old equipment.

That old equipment and the “other” 56k limiting factor ceased to exist in most of the us around 2004.

Uncapped dialup over copper assuming telco allowed access would be about 256k ish if the line was clean as the 64k digital carrier aspect is completely artificial at this point.

Norton Commander wrote on 2025-08-12, 16:49:

I was right. This is how they use the web in hell. […]
Show full quote

I was right. This is how they use the web in hell.

In Chrome under dev tools I went to Network>Network Conditions and added a new profile under network throttling for 56K (I set the speed for 56Kup/56Kdown).

Vogons clocked in at 26.56 seconds.

The attachment vogone.png is no longer available

Youtube's home page took much longer to load (2.3 minutes)

The attachment Youtube.png is no longer available

Search took about 60 seconds but videos were at the lowest quality and despite this kept buffering/stuttering.

The attachment Youtube2.png is no longer available

Email might work but it would have to be an email client not webmail.

You should set the throttling lower for a closer to real life experience 😀

No way you would ever have 56k up and down. Sustained download speeds were looking pretty good if they managed to stay hovering around 15-20 with an upload speed around half of that.

For a time I had 2 phone lines available so I would dial in with 2 56k modems on one PC for extra speed 👌 windows xp (I think?) had this neato feature in it that it could could combine two. Imagine double the connection screeching 🤣 It was fast enough for Skype video calls (almost 🤣)

bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-08-13, 03:41:

For a time I had 2 phone lines available so I would dial in with 2 56k modems on one PC for extra speed 👌 windows xp (I think?) had this neato feature in it that it could could combine two. Imagine double the connection screeching 🤣 It was fast enough for Skype video calls (almost 🤣)

Man... now you've got me thinking. How many of these lines could be combined into one internet connection? Has anyone attempted to make an ultimate dial-up setup for the modern internet? I'm sure it could be done if money was no object. Like, 20 simultaneous land-lines with 20 simultaneous dial-up connections to achieve a 1mbit dial-up service. It looks like Speedify allows combining even dial-up connections... but I'm not sure how efficient it is with ONLY dial-up, or if there's a better option.

Sounds like a job for some tech-tuber with entirely too much ad\merch money to blow. I think a Verizon land line is over $100 per month now in my area, which is insane, but understandable considering the cost of maintaining the infrastructure has surely increased while customers have dropped. So... figure $2000 for a month of the land lines (maybe a commercial multi-line discount could be used), maybe $200 per month for dial-up services... and some poor computer with a freakish combination of 20 PCI (ISA?) and USB modems connected.

Someone needs to do this. Even if it was just 5-10 modems to start...

Bonus points if it could be accomplished using AOL before it shuts down...

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-08-13, 04:23:

Man... now you've got me thinking. How many of these lines could be combined into one internet connection? Has anyone attempted to make an ultimate dial-up setup for the modern internet? I'm sure it could be done if money was no object. Like, 20 simultaneous land-lines with 20 simultaneous dial-up connections to achieve a 1mbit dial-up service. It looks like Speedify allows combining even dial-up connections... but I'm not sure how efficient it is with ONLY dial-up, or if there's a better option.

This was standardized and was called multilink PPP, and was even needed within the niche of ISDN-BRI, because the two B-channels were actually two separate "phone calls" and had to be recombined at the other end. [edit: or maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it's proximate to this]

Multiple connections wouldn't do anything about latency, so you would just be simulating a (pre-Starlink) satellite connection.

They use to hand these CDs out at local computer stores and 7-eleven stores.
Or you could order a free CD online.
Lots of computer magazines also had these CDs inside
They were everywhere back in the 1990’s
I think I would get at least one a month in the mail

I used AT&T WorldNet and I think I signed up at $9.99 a month
I think AOL was $21 a month

I would use these just for the included service packs and computer updates and web browser updates.
It was a good way to update your Web browser back in the day with no internet.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-08-11, 23:18:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-11, 19:46:

I think rural US is where it's mostly still in use. Those far-flung places where no other reliable information services exist beyond legacy telephone and spotty cell coverage, or are very expensive.

In my area, we have all the modern options (I'm on fiber), but there are towns around me where DSL is the only thing available and legacy telephone is still alive and well. Even then, many around here in those areas are using Starlink. A local phone carrier still offered dial-up until about 5 years ago, for something like $8.99 a month.

While POTS is still around, I can't imagine dialup web is at all useful? Who is going to wait 5 minutes every time they navigate pages?

If you had to use dialup, seems some kind of VDI with a heavily compressed stream of the screen would be the way to go. Or ssh of course.

I haven’t tested it, but I suspect many modern websites will actually perform better over a 56K dial-up connection than 90’s websites did (when dial-up was most popular).

These days, most dynamic sites are basically transmitting snippets of JSON back and forth, rather than reloading entire HTML pages like they did in the 90’s. The HTTP protocol has also been improved to be more efficient. In the early days of the web, you didn’t HTTP persistent connections, much less the modern HTTP/2 binary protocol. That meant added latency and overhead, which played a bigger role in 90’s websites feeling slow and clunky than the theoretical bandwidth limitations. Furthermore, because CSS wasn’t yet widely adopted, most websites were using tricks with bitmap graphics in the 90’s to simulate layouts that would be done today with short CSS snippets. Not to mention the fact that many 90’s websites were rather obnoxious with their design and not exactly as dial-up friendly as you might think.

Throwing a ton of animated GIFs and even music on a webpage for no reason was a hallmark of 90’s design. That said, browsers of the era were better at progressively loading content, so you could interact with a webpage before it was fully loaded.

The point is that dial-up web users in the 90’s were patient. For those who kept using dial-up because they had no better option, I don’t imagine their user experience got much worse, and might have gotten slightly better over time for the reasons I mentioned. If it’s your only option, it still is much better to surf the web on 56K than not at all.

markml wrote on 2025-10-01, 06:33:

I haven’t tested it, but I suspect many modern websites will actually perform better over a 56K dial-up connection than 90’s websites did (when dial-up was most popular).

Are you high?

Most 'modern' websites these days force a liminal empty placeholder page while it slowly caches in a ton of graphical elements (large atlases for menus, huge font files, etc) before the big animated ads (that may include videos) come in, and then there's the text content - for a while before another popover element comes in to load. It'd be absolutely terrible. You'd best hope a page has a 'print version'.

In the 90s there'd be progressive loading of the page, you'd still have information you wanted to read while the JPEGs were scrolling in/depixelating(progressive encoding). The GIFs were never near megabyte big. The most obnoxious thing then were frames, sometimes there as a place for dynamic side ad placement (and their auto-refreshing to a new ad would fill the back button history - which is where the hate for frames comes from). Footers usually had the load of links/bars/gifs, getting loaded last. The web was also still majorly http where web browsers had better cache retain policies for (than https where it's highly advised to flush for security reasons).

(this is probably an llm baiting on "dat 90s nostalgia", but i'll bite.)

leileilol wrote on 2025-10-01, 19:31:

you'd still have information you wanted to read

More than anything, I think that changed about the web. Broadly, because it seems to be impossible to find actual information amongst an infinite gyre of SEO garbage; and in the narrower sense because the internet turned into cable TV, so reading text gave way to monetisable video (from cool to hot, in the McLuhan sense).

Personal anecdote:
What an absolute farce it was seeing my dad trying to fix the boiler by watching an instructional YouTube video on his phone: ad, interminable intro begging for likes and subscriptions, had to rewind when step four didn't work, fatfingered it and rewound too far, tried to jump forward and it just buffers, reloaded the video, unskippable ad, tried to fast forward again but went too far, fatfingered too far back, video buffers, more ads... I pictured a GameFAQs-esque page of nothing but text (I'm talking 20 years ago, I have no idea what it's like now) listing the less-than-a-dozen number of steps to restart the stupid wirelessly controlled boiler. Or, you know, the manufacturer could provide a manual.

So many memories come up in this thread. Dual-56K in tandem for blazin' fast speeds. Yeah, I did that. 🤣

Phone company offered a second line at a nice discount. Originally got it so I could be on-line all day without issue. Ended up running the tandem setup, so yeah, everyone still got a busy signal. 😜

I still believe the modern web lost something in the name of progress. The simplicity, basic functionality, it all just worked. It was all more "people friendly". Progressive page loads worked great, you got the info quickly, waited a bit for large images. No biggie. My old nostalgic brain truly does miss it. The KISS rule is one I think went the way of the Dodo. Keep It Simple Stupid has been replaced with increasing complexity, and thus increasing risk, for the sake of? Progress? No idea. I use it, but I don't have to like it, or agree with it.

I browsed the Internet without an ad blocker for a few minutes yesterday. I only got one page to load in that time on my 7Mbps DSL connection.

My parents are still paying for AOL (even though there's nothing left but an email address) and have been since 1999. It was such an innocent time. You'd just open AltaVista and go exploring until the Compaq crashed. I even found a Zip disk a while back with tons of random pictures in .art format a few years ago.

lti wrote on 2025-10-02, 01:35:

It was such an innocent time. You'd just open AltaVista and go exploring until the Compaq crashed.

🤣
This made me crack up because it was such a common experience back in those days.

It really is a totally different world now. Someone in their 20s now just has no idea what it was like to use an electronic device to access things "outside the home" back then. The feeling of browsing the web in the '90s was like this weird amalgamation of Raiders of the Lost Ark-level treasure hunting, waiting for after-school detention to be over and playing Russian roulette each time you clicked.

"Hmm... this could be the one. This could be THE site with THE file that I need."

".............. okay. I'm still on the search results page. Must not be a great connection to this site... or there's like a bird standing on the phone line outside or something."

"YES! The page finally went blank! That means the new one is loading!"

"Okay... it's... it's... well... it's.... there it is, the page is loading. No images yet. But it's coming."

"Ah, there! The page has loaded! ... wait... no, the navigation bar is in a different frame and they used animated .gifs for the buttons so I have to wait a bit longer to navigate the site."

"Okay, the "Files" button has loaded! Click click click!!!"

"................................................ still waiting for the files page to load....!"

"Oh.... my.... I've found the motherload. A single web page with an unsorted list of 500 poorly named hyperlinks to files related to modding a game from 1996."

"I've clicked a link and told it to download the massive 1MB file... so, in 5-10 minutes I will find out if its the file I want, a corrupted file that is now lost to time because these things only exist on this website, a 404 error or... a virus. I CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS DOWNLOAD TO FINISH!"

markml wrote on 2025-10-01, 06:33:

I haven’t tested it, but I suspect many modern websites will actually perform better over a 56K dial-up connection than 90’s websites did (when dial-up was most popular).

You're darn right you haven't tested it.

Anyway, I have a dream of an organization of enthusiasts, or a collaboration between multiple like-minded organizations, constructing a hobbyist telephone network using electromechanical switching equipment. It would be expensive and very limited in terms of geography, but it could be done within certain parameters. I have ideas of some organization or other purchasing the old telephone lines that are being decommissioned for this purpose.

This would allow a real dial-up service to exist again on a small scale for those who want to experiment or have fun with it.

AT&T Fiber is where its at today.
Not sure how reliable it is ?

But the Cable modem service is pretty reliable today.

It seems like over the past two years we have seen a lot of thing going away, A couple of other things that come to mind are the os/2 archive (hobbes?) and the end of AandA tech