AOL Disconnects Dial Up Service

Sunday, 5 October 2025, 13:00 Dr. Tar Uncategorized 20

nbc news

Once a dominant technology player, AOL, initially called America Online, provided the gateway for millions of people to get their first taste of the web. Signing into the service — a process accompanied by a noisy, garbled series of computerized tones that sounded like a drowning robot — became a rite of passage.

The dial-up shutdown was first reported in August. A representative for AOL did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a brief note posted to its help page, the company said the decision was made as part of a routine evaluation of its products and services. More

20 Comments on AOL Disconnects Dial Up Service

  3. Bzzzz bzzzz eeerrrr bssss… clunk…

    “We’re sorry, our dial-up service has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you’ve reached this recording in error, you’re SOl. Also, your fingers are too fat. Hang up and try to get a life.”

    4

  8. 300 baud acoustic phone coupler. Had one.
    Then 1200, 9600, 19.2K and smokin’ fast 56K modems!! (I don’t recall if 38,400 was a thing.) We were rippin’ it on Compuserve even before AOL.

    And then, those blindingly fast T1 lines! Manna from heaven! 70K Bytes per second!

    6

  12. I remember when AOL bid for Time Warner with a stock swap. I wasn’t investing at the time, but it was such an obvious short opportunity. And it most certainly went that way! Steve Case knew his company was massively overvalued, that growth was over and decline imminent, and he was able to swap shares of his doomed company for a solid one. I sure wonder what the Time Warner board was thinking.

    4

  15. Hell I remember we were two shorts and a long and anyone could listen in.

    We used to say:
    Three Dots
    Four Dots
    Two Dots
    A Dash
    Let’s light up the plates and talk some trash

    1

  16. Try jamming data down a 3kHz wide SSB HF radio channel. RTTY would run 75, 150, or 300 baud. After digital signal processing (DSP) development, HF modems could achieve speeds of up to 4800 baud. At lower baud rates those HF modems could use time or frequency diversity, forward error correction, and data interleaving to pull error free data from a negative signal to noise ratio signal.

    3

  17. For anyone who is waxing nostalgic about AOL connecting tone, just miss-dial (dial?) into a working fax number. They’re still out there. Don’t ask me how I know.

    2

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