this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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(page 2) 43 comments
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[–] rozodru@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

back in the early 00s I used to do AOL tech support. Even then a lot of people were on cable or DSL. Vast majority of calls we got were from people out in the boonies or the elderly so it doesn't surprise me that there are still a good chunk of people on dialup.

Actually by that point most of our calls weren't even for Dial Up. the thing with AOL support back then was if the user also had other computer issues unrelated to AOL that they brought up while on the line with us we HAD to address them and try to do support for it. Callers would discover this fact and use AOL tech support as a defacto go to tech support for ALL computer issues. They'd start off with some random easy to fix (they knew how to fix) dialup issue and then would say "oh wow you fixed it, I wish you could also help me with this problem I've been having for awhile with..." and yup, we'd roll our eyes and say "oh, what what's wrong?" A good chunk of my calls, believe it or not, would be for printer issues.

[–] Raiderkev@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 5 points 2 months ago

Ah the USR sportster. An ubiquitous workhorse of the early '90s

[–] viking 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Oh wow, dial-up in Germany died 20+ years ago. I'm surprised that's still a thing. Well, was. But until now is really staggering. I wonder what you could even still do over such a connection, considering that even messenger services and email now use 3-5MB just completing the server handshake.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] raef@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I don't think you appreciate how remote many people are in the US. There's now way they would ever run cable or ISDN out to them. A run of an ISDN line can only be really short.

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 5 points 2 months ago

Ahh, I had the older "stylophone" style sportster. 28.8k. I think I have 2 really old miracom couriers somewhere, inherited from when my old office closed down. Actually I might even have an IBM RS6000/220 from the same shutdown at my parent's house.

Well that went off on a tangent.

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

No more free AOL disks? AWWWW

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world -3 points 2 months ago
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