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> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour Let me guess: are you American? Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more tha
by lproven 3y ago
> That idle timeout was pretty important when AOL cost $1/hour
Let me guess: are you American?
Brit here. Our phonecall connection charges were a lot more than that. The ROTW pays for local calls as well as long-distance. $1/hr would have been great. I paid closer to $1/min for dial-up. We all used OLRs: Offline Readers. An app that dials your service provider, posts all outgoing messages, grabs all new messages into a file, zips it, downloads it and any pending file downloads, then hangs up.
They were great and all message reading was local, hence fast: no lag at all, even on 14.4kb/s.
But CI$ ones were rubbish and AOL didn't have one at all, 'til it went toll-free in about 1998.
I am still liamproven@aol.com to this day.
- flerchin 3y agoTIL that Brits used America Online.
- lproven 3y agoAOL UK launched in 1996. My account is a journalist's complimentary one from back then. It was a worldwide service which is why it rebranded as "AOL". I don't really use it any more, but one of its half a dozen alternate account names is still my mother's primary email address.
- bdavbdav 3y agoI’m sure we fairly quickly (as in fairly quickly after 56k became a thing) had zero call rate ISPs who just charged a small monthly. We used to use FreeUK (eventually taken over by Clara), and had a second line dedicated to it.
- lproven 3y agoYes, it did come, you're right. It was about 15 years or so after the BBS boom in the USA, though, which was driven by free local calls.