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 Yesterday, 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 Yesterday, 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.