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Topic: AOL. . .Just now closing dial-up Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Brian Hughes
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Joined: 15 June 2015
Location: United States
Posts: 369
Posted: 13 August 2025 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply
Seriously, I didn't think they still had that in their footprint,

https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/aol-to-ditch-dial-up-inter net-service-244707397686
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Matt Hawes
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 16649
Posted: 14 August 2025 at 12:57am | IP Logged | 2 post reply
I still use AOL for email. LOL! But, yeah, a looong time since I used it for dial-up.
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 135050
Posted: 14 August 2025 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply
SQUEEEE awk DUN DUN DUN DUN……
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Vinny Valenti
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Joined: 17 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 8329
Posted: 14 August 2025 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply
It took me until 2009 to finally convince my mom to move onto greener pastures from AOL Dialup. She was actually paying for a separate phone line to dedicate for the connection! She kept telling me that she didn't want to lose access to her email, even though I kept saying that she can still access it over another Internet connection if she wanted to. What finally got her to switch was the end of analog TV, needing to switch to a cable provider to keep watching her shows. They of course offered a Cable/Internet bundle, and that was that.
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Evan S. Kurtz
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Joined: 04 July 2022
Location: Canada
Posts: 163
Posted: 14 August 2025 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply
A lot of the improvements since then have been great, but it's hard to deny that the internet was a better place before everyone started figuring out how to monetize every aspect of it, and those who use it.
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James Woodcock
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Joined: 21 September 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 8272
Posted: 14 August 2025 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply
In addition to those sounds JB posted above, I will forever remember the
dun dun, de dun dun de dun before getting a text.
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Mark Haslett
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Joined: 19 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 7031
Posted: 15 August 2025 at 4:07am | IP Logged | 7 post reply
How many JBF posters here started on that AOL board?

Me posting here is the one part of AOL’s existence which remains in my life
(that I know of).
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Aki Himmanen
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: Finland
Posts: 643
Posted: 15 August 2025 at 10:00am | IP Logged | 8 post reply
Ooh, the memories.

You could actually mute the modem's speaker with a command, which I did when I used my Amiga 500 to connect to the University of Helsinki dial-up service (for... er, research, and other academic stuff, obviously. Oh, all right! NetHack and IRC, and browsing USENET groups, mainly. It was UNIX.) 

No need for that noise while others were trying to sleep. It sometimes took a few tries to connect.
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