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AOL Dial-Up Internet Service to End After 34 Years
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Not just Xfinity. They also handle email for Verizon and a couple of other ISPs.I wouldn’t think that since they just made a deal with Xfinity to take over the email service for them.
Xfinity Email move to Yahoo Mail
Starting in June 2025, Comcast will begin moving all comcast.net email accounts to Yahoo Mail. Yahoo will host and support these accounts moving forward. Customers will be notified before the move and given multiple options.www.xfinity.com
I suspect your estimate of their userbase is a wee bit pessimistic. AOL was actually one of the few truly successful internet providers, during their heyday. There are all sorts of stories about how they paid their people in stock when they couldn't afford to doll out actual raises. On paper, thousands of AOL employees were millionaires at one point in time -- supposedly including some of the janitorial staff, according to the rumors of that time. Mind, as with all such stories, there was almost certainly some exaggeration... but it's simple to dig up the financials, and the company was worth as much as $200 billion at its height; no doubt some people made their fortunes there, if the managed to sell before the dot-com bubble burst.
I can't honestly say that I'll "miss" AOL... but I think that for any computer geeks who lived through that era, AOL likely iconifies the nostalgia of that period; it truly was the Wild, Wild West of the internet.
I still have my original AOL account, circa 1992. Never sign on to AOL, but I do have an alternative AOL email that I have used as a legacy account for my business that I retired and closed last year (hey, it's free!). Judging from an alumni directory I received last year, the vast majority of people who at least still use AOL for email are age 60+.
I remember the AOL disc, and being absolutely thrilled with upgrading my 4.8K baud modem to 14.4K...
I remember the AOL disc, and being absolutely thrilled with upgrading my 4.8K baud modem to 14.4K...
Wow, the memories! I recall periodically getting the install CDs with some number of free minutes to my childhood mailbox. I wasn't aware so many people were still using it.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" -most kids think that is a solid blue...
"The internet" definitely existed - and was referred to as such - well before WWW came along - gradually embracing and extending ARPANET, As well as tha more traditional logging in to remote computers there was the whole SMTP-based email infrastructure, Usenet (as you mentioned) providing the social media, many FTP archives for software and other stuff and even a visual/point-and-click interface for browsing the internet, Gopher, that was really the forerunner of WWW. Whether you want to strictly link it to TCP/IP, the IETF standards or use "internet" more generally to mean multiple interconnected networks is up for grabs. The UK academic network (JANET) and other institutional networks around the world resisted TCP/IP for a long time in favour of X25 and an aspiration to use the OSI protocols (which were superior to TCP/IP in most ways other than a few minor details like "being able to talk with the exponentially growing user base of TCP/IP" and "not being vapourware"). However, there was a JANET->Internet gateway.
Oh yes, - email long precedes even the Internet and "modern" mail protocols.
You know what this means don't you? we are going to see AOL CD's appear in online auction sites in their hundreds possibly thousands with sellers describing it as 'Super rare AOL CD, still sealed' ranging from $5 to $15,000 (yes there will be sellers out there who will try their luck).
Oh man, no internet for me I suppose. It was fun while it lasted. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off the grid I go!!!
That is an very large number of people to leave out there hanging!
I wish the FCC could do something to make AOL keep this service up, or to help them transition to something else.
If you are still using dial up after this many years, you probably have significant blockers to moving to something else.
My mom might have still been on this if I hadn't gotten her off 20 years ago. Back then she informed me that AOL was her internet, Yahoo was her browser, and Safari was her website.
I can still remember the jaw-drop of one of my fraternity brothers when he got his first bill in the mail. Fool was letting all of us in the house use his machine to, you know, look at what was then, and still now, one of the most popular things on the internet: pictures of girls...back then, the dialup numbers were not toll-free! And if you fell asleep and let the connection run all night long, ouch!
Back in 1991, I was the tester in our house of this new thing called "Ethernet", and had a free connection to the campus network, so I didn't have to use AOL. The only thing it was useful for back then to a 19 year old boy, was hitting ftp sites that had interesting photos to share. I think it was ftp...crude interface with no previews. The only thing other than interesting photos that was useful, was searching for cheats to Myst
My mother-in-law still has to use AOL dial-up, because there is no cable data or other broadband in her rural area. But, AT&T 5G is 5-bars, so going to just get her a hotspot.
Back in 1991, I was the tester in our house of this new thing called "Ethernet", and had a free connection to the campus network, so I didn't have to use AOL. The only thing it was useful for back then to a 19 year old boy, was hitting ftp sites that had interesting photos to share. I think it was ftp...crude interface with no previews. The only thing other than interesting photos that was useful, was searching for cheats to Myst
My mother-in-law still has to use AOL dial-up, because there is no cable data or other broadband in her rural area. But, AT&T 5G is 5-bars, so going to just get her a hotspot.
I was a AOL beta tester in the late 90’s so I would get free service. I had high speed broadband from startup @home. I had reported numerous times the AOL installation, including their gold master, would break the configuration with @home. AOL never did anything about it and shipped millions of CDs. Once in the hands of customers, everyone started complaining how it broke their high speed internet. It tuned into a huge PR nightmare for AOL. I wrote a long worded email to the beta team how I had report reported the problem a number of times and that I was submitting my resignation from the beta test team. That was the one and only time I ever received a response from the beta team.
If you ask me--and I love being able to do everything on the internet--the world would probably be a better place if internet access had never advanced past hourly-billed AOL dial-up.