AOL Sound No More – The Weird Side of the Internet

AOL Sound No More – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

If you were alive in the 90s, the keys to the world had a particular sound, at once grating and eagerly sought after if you were at the computer. And that sound was dialup. Screechy and staticky, the sound of your computer dialing up was the symbol of freedom, and also the beginning of that subtle anxiety that you sister was going to use the phone in the middle of your download of some MP3 that promised to take seventeen hours.

The buzz-clicking of the AOL sound, that sound that only came to you through minutes that came in a CD that you could somehow find everywhere, accompanied the little figure on the screen, a tryptic of a little portly stick figure running, and getting faster as you got close. The faster was indicated by two lines coming off him. And finally, the picture of him (or her) with friends.

Needless to say, it was a whole thing. And as September, it’s going to be over. Surprisingly, in 2015, 2.1 million people were still using dialup. Now, a couple thousand. So AOL is ending dialup service. Which is shock to me, not because they’re ending it, but that it still existed in the first place. This is the kicker here, that for most people, you need a modem to get a landline, and you need a landline to get dialup. And if you have a modem, well…

So it is with heavy heart that we say goodbye to the marvel of marvels, the dialup sound. Which of course you can find on the internet and make it your ringtone. I do feel bad, not facetiously, that the thousands of people who are still using dialup have no choice but to do that. My hope for them is that it takes forever for AOL to dial into their servers to shut it off.

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