While I hated AOL for reasons, this is the end of an era. RIP
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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AOL will be remembered more fondly for things like this. But, nobody ever has a fond memory of the software AOL shoved out. It was clampware, unreliable and frequently crashed.
But they gave out nice coasters
Eh....I wouldn't call them "nice". They were ok. Wouldn't put them on a nice table.
Before that, they gave out floppy disks. You could tape over the write protect hole and reuse them.
But they were 720k. Barely usable
They were free and not everything needs 1.44MB.
You could punch a hole in the corner and double the capacity 😁
You couldn’t flip a 3.5in floppy
You didn't need to flip it, 3.5" readers could already read both sides, but the hole or lack of is what told them whether both sides were available. I've done it myself.
https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-remember-the-floppy-disk-punch-notcher/
Ahhhhh.
By the time I came around they were all 1.44 floppies
Pfft, bloody kids... 😂
I should have a look, I've got a load of old floppies here, so might have one I've punched 🙂
The early vibe coders.
Today is October 1, 1993.
September is over.
The September that lasted 32 years...
Alas, the damage is done and there's no going back.
You can finally wake me up
Good night, sweet prince.
Alternatively
Several minutes of randomly pitched screeches
Random!? You just don't speak computer!
Oh stewardess; I speak modem.
Eeee eooooooo bong bong scrrrrrr
Fuck AOL they killed CompuServe.
Someone else remembers CompuServe?!
And Prodigy.
Oh my god that’s the funky shit.
Mad Maze....
I loved CompuServe, back in the day.
Get off the phone!
With AOL's exit from dial-up, we are now down to three dial-up ISPs; NetZero, Juno and DSLExtreme.
As a worldnet user old school Juno always had this mystic. AOL was always a blind spot though.
Ah man I am saddened by this. I first got on the internet in 1997 at my house on a 14.4k modem using AOL. In 2001 I got cable internet and still used AOL a little. My career now is because learning to code by reading code from AOL Progs in Visual Basic 3.0. Fuck Steve Case!
Steve Case!
Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
A long time.
Goodbye
So, when the last wagon wheel factory closed down, where there nostalgia pieces in the papers?
I guess not, I just searched and there are still a bunch of places making the wheels.
Where am I going to get hand crafted dial up though
Gimme 20 bucks and I'll come over and screech dialup noises at you while you browse.
Since there are still horse drawn wagons around there are also still manufacturers for wagon wheels. But there were several opinion pieces in newspapers whenever a new technology took over. I'm sure you can find plenty for the time when cars became mainstream.
With a robot beep It dialed one one ooh With a final screech It dialed one one ooh One one oh!
o7