Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.

Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.

What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.

Yeah it largely just worked.

Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.

Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.

Fortunately, I’m able to guide my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.

They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.

Someone born in 1995 would normally be expected to be familiar with CDs because of their parents' music collection.

(And, depending on the family, because of their use as computer media. CDs were still important in 2005 when such a person would be 10.)

they were popular among hacker types during the free phase because they were one of the free ISPs that had an easy-to-fake dialer for a straight tcp/ip connection for nix machines.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...

Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.

"56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998 and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC

Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.

For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.

Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.

56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.

Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.

Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.

A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.

Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.

We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.

For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].

IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...

Can you share any info on how to access it?

Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."

Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."

I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:

- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome

- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.

From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM.

For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.

The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero.

The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value.

An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me.

We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.