And don’t forget the noise of dialup!
3 Likes
I have that as my ringtone on my iPhone
4 Likes
I just read that at one point half the CDs in the US were from AOL.
1 Like
I’m wondering if anyone actually paid for AOL dial-up?
Or did people just keep using those free 500 hour CD promotional giveaways?
1 Like
Yes, the production house where I worked. The owners purchased one AOL account, and the 15 or so employees all got screen names. Only one of us could be logged in at a time. It was not the best plan.
5 Likes
Drink coasters!!
Multitaskers …
1 Like
I worked for AOL, then Oath, from 2015-2018. A time when AOL was purchased by Verizon, then Yahoo got gobbled up as well. They were combined into Oath. RIP. The days of free food were nice!
They had a lot of dial-up customers. Not everywhere in this great land of ours had broadband.
1 Like
I kept an x-minute per year dialup acct on standby … way past the time when dial-up modems were built in. Just in case. Then, when it became impossible to get a usb dial-up modem to play nice with the computer, I gave up. I was one of the first 6 people in my city to get DSL … Bell Atlantic sent a crew to do the wiring in my condo. Verizon sucked up Bell Atlantic, and their service was so abominable that I quit them. Oh, and before DSL, I had ISDN. (for you kiddies out there, you needed 2 phone lines to run the modem. Blazing speed: 128kbs?? ) I think the modem had a serial port connection. I used to keep a carton of my old cables and peripherals, but it was like my cookware stash — except not as useful. I pitched everything.
2 Likes
I did a lot of business travel - US and Europe.
CompuServe was ‘da bombe’ of the day - in Europe for connecting and email.
my travel kit included every adapter known to mankind plus alligator clips . . . .
what was especially nice was the CompuServe ‘central numbers’ - did not have to carry a list of all the CompuServe nodes in every burg,village,city . . .
in 10+ years of frequent European travel, I got stuck only once - unable to break thru the hotel switchboard to modem dial . . . . Austria, tiny village, super neat, wonderful food, but ‘connecting’ was not in the offing…
6 Likes
When my dad was in the hospital 20+ years ago, I took him a laptop so he could hopefully amuse himself. Naturally, this meant going online. Modem wouldn’t work on the hospital phone line, of course, but the hospital sent up some members of their IT/phone team who clandestinely fiddled with the phone closet and got us access to a line that would work. Happy dad.
5 Likes
many ‘internal switchboards’ at USA companies would / will not handle modem dialing.
working at clients I would seek out the fax machines - they had to have a ‘direct line’ to function… very similar to what happened with your dad.
things got easier, but s-l-o-w-e-r when cell phones would Blueooth and/or USB to the computer.
3 Likes
Hmmm … there was a fax machine in his room. (He sought out a VIP room … for a little extra per stay. ).
ISDN are high speed phone lines. Quite commonly used for point-to-point video teleconferences and was considered more private and reliable than IP. But you paid by the minute, so expensive. Used commonly in television for remote guests; the bigger names would get them installed in their home, others had to go to a studio.
1 Like
Fax machines use a POTS line. Plain Old Telephone Service.
1 Like
What’s that?
1 Like
They are the star attraction in the Museum of Office Products, right next to the dot matrix printer.
…or in the office I work in!
2 Likes
from the category of “Believe It OR Not” . . .
there are some businesses, usually involved with ‘legal stuff’ that still require faxes.
they decline/refuse to take stuff email/pdf/etc…
4 Likes
I use a fax.
For some parts of the world (some rural parts), faxes may be more reliable than cellular networks.
I once saw a video of Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd giving each other grief over Doc still using a fax machine. It was a great bit.
But as a Realtor I remember that there were businesses, as Tom pointed out, that still insisted on using a fax machine for legal reasons. So my office had a fax machine sitting in the corner that was used once or twice a month, at most.
3 Likes
Before my office flooded in early August, one of our printers was still set with fax capabilities. For a period of time (up until about 5 years ago) our Flexible Spending benefits company would ONLY accept faxed claims submissions. They finally switched to Debit cards, but they would still accept faxes.
And the only time faxes came in were spam faxes, including roof repairs, sell us your car, faxes addressed to our former company name, which had changed back in 2009, and we even occasionally got the “Mr. Smith, your great-uncle, Alistair Sinclair-Smith in Bath, United Kingdom, died and left his estate to you in the amount of £2,000,000. Please contact his solicitors immediately to receive your inheritance” faxes. 
We’re currently in temporary space, never set up the fax number, and when we finally move into new final space in about 6 months, I’m going to strongly suggest that we not even set up a fax on the printer.
3 Likes
