Dial-up internet and the era it represents \u2013 patchy connections, \u201cYou\u2019ve got mail!\u201d and an upstart tech industry<\/a> \u2013 has been finally laid to rest. As of this week, AOL \u2013 the most popular internet service provider of the late 1990s \u2013 has finally discontinued its dial-up service<\/a>, severing the connection of around 175,000 Americans who still (apparently) are using it. <\/p>\n Most of the world said goodbye to dial-up a long time ago. Most of us live in an age of seamless and relentless connection<\/a> \u2013 neither sleep nor death will stop your phone from pinging with updates. But the story of dial-up is a vital one to understand and could even set the tone for the future. <\/p>\n It certainly can help us parse the chaos of today\u2019s internet-infused reality, as well as what comes next, be it AI chatbots overpowering Google search, an Elon Musk monopoly, or the destruction of the internet entirely. <\/p>\n Back to the future<\/p>\n It was late evening in 2020 when Dr Gough Lui spied a familiar beige box crammed in the corner of his office \u2013 an old computer. \u201cI live and breathe technology,\u201d the biomedical and electronics engineer from Western Sydney University tells me, \u201cI decided to adopt it for a nostalgia trip.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n After a bit of tinkering, he recreated a dial-up connection. \u201cPart of the charm was simply the fact we had to be patient,\u201d he remembers. Flaky connections and dropouts were tolerated, simply put, \u201cbecause it was worth it\u201d.<\/p>\n There has been a noticeable nostalgia for the early internet era lately. The breakneck speed of tech has led to a fondness for a quieter, more comfortable time. The recently opened Nokia Design Archive in Aalto University, Finland, invites people to reminisce about a time of brick phones and before push notifications. The Barbican\u2019s extremely popular emo exhibition \u201cI\u2019m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective\u201d celebrated \u201ca transatlantic subculture that thrived in cyberspace\u201d.<\/p>\n Trends in fashion and on social media suggest that even younger generations are looking back fondly at a time they may not have experienced first hand. Y2K fashion is hitting catwalks and high streets again. TikTok is awash with explorations of old tech-y visual aesthetics, retroactively named things like \u201cFrutiger Aero\u201d (rolling green fields and bright aquatic PC backgrounds) and \u201cUtopian Virtual\u201d (the old art style of educational CD-ROMs and Microsoft Encarta).<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Pandora\u2019s PC: the hardware is chunky by today\u2019s standards, but the machines allowed people access to a burgeoning world (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n Colette Shade, author of Y2K (How the 2000s Became Everything), has noticed this nostalgic longing. \u201cMillennials have a sense memory of dial-up \u2026 Getting the internet installed at your house was a formative experience for many people that age, especially in retrospect.\u201d<\/p>\n But more than this, the idea of \u201cgoing online\u201d is something that younger generations have not experienced; the internet wasn\u2019t \u201cwoven into every aspect of life\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cYou could go online and talk to friends and strangers but then log off and go outside,\u201d she says. Maybe it\u2019s not the Nokia 3310 and low-rise pants we miss from the time, maybe it\u2019s the prospect of living unplugged from the incessant din of the modern tech world. But how did we get here? Where did dial-up come from?<\/p>\n You\u2019ve got mail\u2026<\/p>\n In 1966, a telephone line connected a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts manned by MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts to a Q32 computer on the other side of the country in California, manned by Tom Marrill. The reason for this connection? Like many technological innovations, it was the American military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n US president Dwight Eisenhower had created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 11 years earlier to contend with Soviet Union tech. Working on ballistic missiles and nuclear defences required a network for ARPA computers. Thus, that connection was created. <\/p>\n What was the first message sent using the internet? \u201cLO\u201d. It was meant to be \u201cLOGIN\u201d, but the network crashed. <\/p>\n If the biblical language was incidental, ARPA colleagues Robert Taylor and his boss JCR Licklider would make a prediction that would change everything on God\u2019s green Earth: \u201cIn a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face-to-face.\u201d<\/p>\n It would be people like Barry Shein and Peter Dawe who would help fulfil this far-fetched prophecy. <\/p>\n Shein has a lofty and dystopian-sounding title: CEO of The World \u2013 the first internet service provider for the public. \u201cI had installed the internet at Boston University over several years,\u201d Shein tells me. Many of his customers were former students or recently laid-off Bostonians, who had developed a taste for email and the growing discussions happening online.<\/p>\n In 1989, Shein hired a lease line from UUNET, put five modems on a bookshelf and created something like the personal internet subscription we know today. The internet \u2013 and the widening web available via the connection \u2013 was no longer just for students or workplaces.<\/p>\n Dawe\u2019s business started with similar grandeur at Pipex, the first UK internet service provider that operated a 64k transatlantic lease line to the US. Dawe hired a line from BT, rented a windowless Cambridge office, a PC and a secondhand Astra, and started offering connections to companies. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n AOL, the front-runner of commercial dial-up in the early Noughties, has discontinued their dial-up service (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n These first forays were met with slight disinterest and sometimes scandal. \u201cThere almost immediately appeared an opinion that I was illegally reselling a government resource,\u201d Shein explains of The World\u2019s early days. \u201cAt the time, I estimated we were blocked from about one-third of the internet, but there was still plenty for our customers to access.\u201d<\/p>\n The pushback was commercial as well. Networks were \u201cwalled gardens\u201d, Dawe explains. \u201cThe business model was to lock you in \u2026 But we were happier being promiscuous, and that was a massive innovation.\u201d In 1993, the BBC signed up for a lease line. Pipex expanded abroad, and by the time he had moved on to found the Internet Watch Foundation, he maintains it was responsible for \u201chalf of global internet traffic\u201d.<\/p>\n In 2000, 30 per cent of the US had a dial-up connection, the phone-hogging method was the primary pathway online as the digital superhighway was evolving. But as time pressed onward, broadband \u2013 with its faster connection and higher frequencies freeing up phone lines \u2013 began to surge, and its gain was dial-up\u2019s loss. A decade later, only 5 per cent of Americans were using it to get online.<\/p>\n What comes next?<\/p>\n The \u201cMagnificent Seven\u201d companies<\/a> born from the data-centred era after dial-up now make up 35 per cent of the US stock market. The \u201chippiedom\u201d that Dawe says ran through those early years has been replaced. Innovation and huge amounts of capital walk in lock-step.<\/p>\n Despite rising murmurs of a \u201cbubble\u201d<\/a> and the ever-receding horizon of human-level computer intelligence (AGI), AI is still the tech sector\u2019s big thing. Its disruptiveness, combined with the \u201cens***tification\u201d of search engines could mean that we talk about Google much like we\u2019re talking about dial-up now, in a few years \u2013 or sooner<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gigabit internet is the super-speedy connection that much of the hopes of AI are pegged to. For you, it means faster internet \u2013 it was rolled out to 3,800 homes in Northumberland this year \u2013 for the tech overlords, it means \u201cquantum computing\u201d, a complex kind of technology that borrows scientific notions of \u201centanglement\u201d and \u201csuperpositions\u201d to (potentially) solve big issues in pharmaceutical development and engineering.<\/p>\n The achievement of all of this still requires a connection to the internet, and on that, Dawe has his dark predictions. \u201cStarlink is a fly in the ointment\u201d when it comes to the free market of connection. Elon Musk\u2019s company provides satellite internet services, and Dawe says it could grow to monopolise internet connections.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n The Jaguar Land Rover cyber attacks are a harrowing warning about putting our trust in newer technology (AFP\/Getty)<\/p>\n The other issue is the shift towards cloud computing. It works, Dawe says, until it doesn\u2019t. Internet outages were reported in the Middle East and Asia at the start of this month, linked to Red Sea cables being \u201ccut\u201d, according to Microsoft. Governments in countries affected were fairly quiet on the events, but in an increasingly polarised world where vital infrastructure is in the aether of the cloud, one can only imagine what a larger outage could do. <\/p>\n The recent cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer, The Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover could be a horrifying portent. All three companies outsource to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for a range of tech needs, including \u2013 at least for The Co-op \u2013 adopting a “cloud-first strategy”. <\/p>\n If all of this sounds a little frantic and entropic, media theorist and author Geert Lovink agrees, and he\u2019s had enough.<\/p>\n \u201cThings are finite, and that is in contradiction to Silicon Valley and its need for eternal growth,\u201d he says. His radical 2022 text, Extinction Internet, purports the need for a detachment from this seamless connection, to overcome the \u201cpolycrisis\u201d we face, along with an understanding of the new techno-social dimension of the mind, and how it has been saturated by all-you-can-scroll content, delivered via a seamless internet connection. <\/p>\n He\u2019s quick to point out that the cost of the internet has stayed the same since the days of The World and Barry Shein, but everyone pays it with no complaints. <\/p>\n And for what? For that dial-up promise of \u201cpeople connecting\u201d and a democratised cyberspace to be lost in a haze of chatbots and politically noxious social media platforms? Or for tech-libertarians to make money off of our cyberspace psyches while we are left with smartphone addictions and emaciated attention spans? <\/p>\n The first message on the internet may have had a biblical tinge, but the first ever message sent via electronic communication \u2013 Samuel Morse and his telegraph in 1844 \u2013 was a direct Bible quote: \u201cWhat hath God wrought?\u201d It feels more apt by the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A familiar tone turns into phantom dialling. The little box in your house or office is calling out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[49,48,244,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-186956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Pandora\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/iStock-1937030113.jpeg\")
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