Thread 106203733

AOL dial-up to be discontinued in September

https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued

How many people are still using it?

>>106203733 (OP)
I thought they were completely out of the ISP game for decades now?

>>106203733 (OP)
STOP KILLING ISPS

>>106203733 (OP)
So much media was lost because it was locked up in AOL's proprietary forums and web-alike.

>>106203733 (OP)
Wow, I feel the same thing I felt when ICQ was discontinued.
Incidentally, a lot less distraught than I would have thought 25+ years ago.

>>106203733 (OP)
ironic that it's September, considering September never ended thanks to them

>>106203733 (OP)
>>106203840
A nostalgic feeling, but since we haven't used either in decades, it's not much beyond that.

>>106204112
Exactly.
I remember the last time I fired up ICQ, before it was disconnected. Had my old login and everything.
Over a hundred people on my list. I scanned their names. So many of them I had memorable conversations with. Hours of conversations, attempts to cyber (hey, I was a teen), etc.
Just a ghost town. All gone on with their lives. Some probably dead. 99% never to be chatted with again.
That part made me a bit sad. But ICQ itself? Just another network from a bygone era.

>>106204158
Pretty much. Thinking about it now, I wish I tried logging into my MSN, ICQ or Skype account before they went down forever, but I highly doubt that anyone I knew still used any of them at that time, so whatever.

>>106203733 (OP)
it has never been more over
how will hiro ever recover without all the passfags dialing in
>>106203772
idk about aol but in the US, more people have no internet whatsoever than have dial up
https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2019.B28011?q=ACSDT1Y2019.B28011&hidePreview=true

>>106204158
meanwhile the chinese turned their icq clone into a must have app for all forms of banking/communication/networking and its used to this very day.

>>106203733 (OP)
didn't know they still had it

>>106203733 (OP)
America Offline

A few years ago there were still over a million accounts on auto-bill so AOL was kept nominally in operation, allowing them to continue charging those accounts each month, even if the user hadn't logged on in the past decade. Maybe the cost of pretending to be providing a service to those zombie account is now greater than what they're receiving from charging those accounts each month.

>>106203772
I've seen people in Dreamcast-Talk use free dial-up services to connect to the Internet without broadband for Quake 3 and PSO

>>106205634
think that guy meant people using it for actual internet

>>106203772
A surprising number, our internet infrastructure sucks. There are places in China and Russia that have better internet than the best places in the US and have more places interconnected

>>106205578
well credit/debit cards do expire after a while

>>106203733 (OP)

there are many kind internet users maybe in mid nineties aol users were slightly different than others

>>106205861
I was going to say you proved him wrong but then I thought that some of these accounts could be old 90s accounts set up with bank transfers and not done through credit and debit

>>106206234
There's also a service with the credit card companies that automatically roll over credit cards to a new expiration date for subscriptions. I've seen this on GoDaddy where expired cards are still charged because the credit card companies give GoDaddy the new expiration date without needing any customer interaction. This service for vendors has been around for about a decade. I'm guessing there's an extra charge for the service so not every company does it.
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-account-updater-product-information-fact-sheet-for-merchants.pdf

>>106203733 (OP)
RIP in peace

>>106205378
Goodbye