Technology

Not too bad really, considering that software developer has milked that cow for way longer than anyone would've thought. Those last 5 years will be challenging though, but maybe the software developer can sprinkle some AI over their resume and magically land some weird role that nobody can explain why we need it in the first place.

Capitalism milked that shit D R Y.

I still use my old aim account as my spam email email address. Any business asks for my email, they get that one. There's like 5,000 unread emails in there. It keeps my actual email uncluttered and not full of spam. It'll be a sad day when they close down those servers, then I'll have to to dust off the ole Hotmail account lol

Hell, I'm sure there are still some places that only have dialup.

Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/

And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there's nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.

In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.

In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.

The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn't been in a long time. But that's the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.

Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven't updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.

Just over the weekend I browsed trough my old blog (yes, those were a thing too) to check which year I did some remodeling on our house and stumbled on a note where I complained about slow 3G connection about 10 years ago. Compared to traditional dial-up that's still orders of magnitude faster(~10/1Mbps back then on our location) but on a snowy day (with severe packet loss) it apparently took 10 minutes to get Skype and XMPP to even log in and over a minute to get SSH session open.

I suppose you can just barely get email trough today and even then you better not be in a hurry.

AOL used to setup kiosk systems at computer stores so customers could experience AOL in the store, and each store was given a login account. Long after the kiosks went down, these accounts remained active, providing those employees "in the know" with free AOL all throughout its pay-by-the-hour years.

But I only needed three more 30 day trials to finish downloading cd2 of the phantom menace cam that I started in 1999...

It's a really fun drinking boardgame game now.

https://slugfestgames.com/rdi-products/

LORD is still out there if you look. I think they have leaderboards under a new name

What's that?

Me too!

(obscure reference time)

Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.

Understanding this joke makes me feel old.

Deep cut appreciated and approved of.

I actually had no idea that Firefox only exists because of AOL (The Mozilla Browser evolved into Firefox for those not in the know). Thanks for sharing that interesting bit of history.