You’ve Got Mail

[DWalt]

I read an interesting news story yesterday about AOL. Seems that it is terminating dial-up internet connection service in September. Most here probably remember attaching a modem to your telephone and listening to that screechy sound it made while it connected. I had assumed dial-up, and AOL, went extinct over 20 years ago, but that is not correct. The story said that there were still areas of the country that had no other way to connect to the internet, but it did not say where. I still have somewhere an old phone with a built-in modem, I had forgotten about it. I do remember buying it at Radio Shack. That was long ago when I still had a land line.

 

[TX-Dennis]

I used AOL briefly in the early 90s. Then switched to Prodigy which was still dial up. First dial up modem was 14.4. Last one was 56.6 kbps. Imagine trying to look at today's image and video heavy web at those speeds. Would take hours to load some pages.

My first cable connection (probably around 1999-2000) was 30 mbps down and 300 k up, if memory serves.

 

[LVSteve]

I used AOL briefly in the early 90s. Then switched to Prodigy which was still dial up. First dial up modem was 14.4. Last one was 56.6 kbps. Imagine trying to look at today's image and video heavy web at those speeds. Would take hours to load some pages.

My first cable connection (probably around 1999-2000) was 30 mbps down and 300 k up, if memory serves.

Indeed, improved bandwidth and processing power brings out a rabid desire in today's webpage writers to fill that new capability with junk.

In Nevada there is a place called Stonewall Pass. I suspect the old phone lines there struggle with 56k. In Steve's not-so-benign dictatorship, all webpage writers should be required to spend time there in a drafty double-wide so that they learn to write efficient code, in between dealing with the snakes, coyotes, and windscorpions. Get caught junking up your pages, and you get sent back for "re-education".

 

[Onomea]

I recall visiting Volcano Village on the Big Island of Hawaii in the early 2000s. The only way to connect via email back to my office in Tokyo was to connect my laptop to a public phone in the courtyard of the hotel I was staying at. Took a while to send and receive, but it worked. Used to plug in once a day to keep tabs on things.

I suppose DSL is still out there, an internet connection that works over phone lines.

 

[Rule3]

 

[CRT2]

1984 and using 2400 baud modem to connect a Perkin-Elmer mini computer to a mainframe in the Pentagon. Those were the days. PC Jr.

 

[Rudi]

I still have a land line. But have sat. internet.

 

[Rustyt1953]

Two years ago I was using a landline solely for my pacemaker telemetry transponder.

Now my Wi-Fi provider handles it.

No hiccups so far.