AOL Dial-Up Was The Worst

Everyone had to have gotten a few dozen of these.

Back in middle school, my parents set me up with KOL (Kids OnLine or something) because there was a hentai incident as a recent family gathering.

Fuck KOL and dial-up for interfering with my Runescape time. I only have nostalgia for the sounds it made as it tied up your phone line.

Living on the outskirts of town with Clearwire was the fucking worst lmao

Someone never used netzero.

AOL Dial Up was the shit! It helped changed the entire fucking world and, at the time, the alternative was not having the internet.

Sure, it was slow, but we didnt know any better at first... plus 6 hours for porn is better than no porn.

AOL Dial up was pretty cool in the mid 90s. I can imagine the pain of trying to use dial-up with YouTube. I hope it didn't say buffering!!

Also, netzero did suck. Kept trying to use it with my Dreamcast, but it would frequently disconnect for no reason.

But it was all we had at the time, and it was glorious.

Booki said:

Back in middle school, my parents set me up with KOL (Kids OnLine or something) because there was a hentai incident as a recent family gathering.

Fuck KOL and dial-up for interfering with my Runescape time. I only have nostalgia for the sounds it made as it tied up your phone line.

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This thread is now about the hentai incident

A/S/L?

Booki said:

Back in middle school, my parents set me up with KOL (Kids OnLine or something) because there was a hentai incident as a recent family gathering.

Fuck KOL and dial-up for interfering with my Runescape time. I only have nostalgia for the sounds it made as it tied up your phone line.

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You can't just post something like this and leave us hanging

AOL was the shit back in the day. Of course we didn't know any better and there really wasn't any alternatives.

Breh I had netzero in like 2005.

AOL cut off the entire house's internet because I typed in wtf in the kids chat when I was a kid. They actually had my mom call them to enable the internet back up again. Fucking hated their browser and bullshit lol.

ISWThunder said:

Sure, it was slow, but we didnt know any better at first... plus 6 hours for porn is better than no porn.

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I had like tantric master climax control from waiting so long for porn to download as a teen.

To escape AOL I used TIA with my college's UNIX system to tunnel Internet to Netscape. Any other TIA users out there?

ISWThunder said:

AOL Dial Up was the shit! It helped changed the entire fucking world and, at the time, the alternative was not having the internet.

Sure, it was slow, but we didnt know any better at first... plus 6 hours for porn is better than no porn.

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For porn I quickly learned about local BBS connections. Plus we trade floppy disks at school. Those were the days.

I used to have $20 long distance phone charges monthly that I had to pay my parents. They never knew what I was downloading.

"You've Got Mail"

It took so long to load 1 .jpeg; if an HD video takes longer than 5 minutes to download today, I'm damn near ready to curse out Verizon.

using dial up during the youtube era, fuck that's tragic.

Who remembers these sounds?:

12K dialup haunting my childhood memories tbqh

My rich friend had 56K. Fuck him

Andrew Korenchkin said:

I had it from 2005 to 2006 at least.

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That is honestly sad. I was using TIA in 1999 to escape AOL hell. 2005? WTF??? :)

It was all we had for the longest time. I still remember that horrible sound from the dial up modems. They haunt my dreams.

Those were the greatest days of my internet history. Meeting ppl in chatrooms, going to random fan webpages

Wait, you had AOL dialup when YouTube was around? That'd be the mid 2000's, at least!

I remember when we upgraded from a 14.4k modem to a 56k modem, and we never got a connection better than 26.4 and neither our internet or our phone company was willing to admit they were at fault.

We never had AOL, but rather we had EarthLink, then changed to SBC Yahoo, and then to a local provider. Both EarthLink and SBC Yahoo we're terrible on the weekends and during the evening, averaging about 24Kbps. Even at the time, that was practically unusable. My friend had AOL, though, and the browser was really bad. His average speed was better than ours, but again, that browser. We eventually found a workaround so we could use a better browser (our browser of choice at the time was Flashpeak Slim Browser). I think we just figured out the number AOL dialed out to, and used that in conjunction with his username and password with the built-in dialer in Windows.

Andrew Korenchkin said:

We didn't know any better!

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You poor thing. ;_;

Dialup internet in the mid-2000s??? Wow!!!!! I remember my family finally upgraded from dialup to cable broadband in the early 2000s and I was so happy with the much faster download speeds cable broadband had.

I'm not gonna bite the hand that helped raise me. I was like 10 and played games on Miniclip.

And I remember having AOL dialup, my family had AOL dialup from at least 1990 until the early 2000s.

Who remembers using dialup to download shareware games that took hours to complete over dialup?

i could never fathom using AOL/dialup after circa 2003 or so but for years that was "the internet"

i remember that log in graphic being like a roulette wheel. will you get to go ONLINE?? or not?? lady luck be with you

I had dial up from 99 to 2006 best thing about aol was the chat rooms.

It was through AOL dialup I had my AIM account from. I miss AIM, gathered a large buddy list of people who I chatted with frequently.

Earthlink checking in.

Yeah, it sucked.. but man we're chat rooms on AOL so much fun. It was like being a preteen in the Wild West. Truly a special time. Just gotta hope no one calls and kicks you off.

We've come so far. Wow. It is not often you get to see technology transform this fast in your lifetime.

Lol I'm typing this from my phone. Sending messages through the fucking air, across the planet to random users, using a touchscreen device. Man oh man. In also watching a youtYou video with Android's multitasking feature btw.

AOL was amazing but I had it in the late 90's early '00 and there was nothing else like it. Watching YouTube on dialup sounds horrible tho.

Rapscallion said:

Yeah, it sucked.. but man we're chat rooms on AOL so much fun. It was like being a preteen in the Wild West. Truly a special time. Just gotta hope no one calls and kicks you off.

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I hated that with dialup, especially when I was downloading a game over dialup and it took hours, came back and found the connection got disconnected so the download needed to start all over again.

I actually played Xbox Live Gold on the Xbox 360 with a dialup shared connection.

Rockstar presents Table Tennis, and some rolling ball game with a name I forget.

skeezx said:

remember that log in graphic being like a roulette wheel. will you get to go ONLINE?? or not?? lady luck be with you

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Oh my god yes

Trying to find porn in the dial up are was the greatest technical training of my life.

I don't know when my family got AOL but I used it from like 2001 (when I was 5) to 2011-ish in my house. I remember we had two PCs in the computer room and one was supposed to be 'my' computer and it had the kid version of AOL installed but since I could use both computers, I'd just use the normal one.

But I say I stopped using AOL in 2011, it wasn't even because we finally upgraded to proper internet. No, we didn't get modern internet (and cancel our AOL subscription) until like 2014. Nah, I just started leeching off the neighbor who didn't password protect their wifi. It was hella slow (in retrospect, but compared to AOL it was blazing fast) and sometimes I couldn't connect at all but goddammit it was 'proper' internet.

It honestly really sucked because I basically missed tons of classic internet memes and viral videos because like, how could I watch YouTube and stuff on dial-up? Hell I remember leaving my laptop on all night just to download ONE episode of an anime.

I feel like AOL free hour CDs are one of the most vaporwave things that exist in real life

Did anyone ever just say fuck it and run up dozens of hours on your bill?