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Dialtone – AOL 3.0 Server
- pram 10mo agoAmazing work! Started playing Civ on the VM and wasted 3 hours lol
- b33j0r 10mo agoJust one more turn before my family can send and receive phone calls on the landline.
- JojoFatsani 10mo agoOh man. I’ve been hoping someone would build this. “The internet we lost” was formative for a whole generation for better or worse. One thing I’d wish for would be for it to use an LLM other than grok though.
- klooney 10mo agoMaybe you just really need unhinged mode for verisimilitude
- bitwize 10mo agoAOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic. Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
- Telemakhos 10mo agoThis. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.
- devin 10mo agoIt can be both. For many, AOL was their onboarding platform for the chaotic internet at large. It served that purpose well.
- literatepeople 10mo agoGiven their seeming affinity towards signing in with "X" I doubt you'll have the option.
- agentifysh 10mo agowhat was AOL exactly i never experienced it but would constantly get these CDs in the mail with Air Warrior
- pests 10mo agoAOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online. When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc. You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from. You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers. You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting. aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.
- burnto 10mo agoI was pretty young at the time, but I think it started as basically a BBS. With an Internet backbone so a bunch of local numbers could all access the same server. They added Internet access later, and initially only via their own browser.
- pests 10mo agoI admit I was a young child during the AOL-mailer-cd era. I don't really know what came before.
- keyle 10mo ago"Zerocool" nice touch :-)
- vunderba 10mo agoStill waiting on a Prodigy online emulator, but in the meantime at least somebody recreated MadMaze! https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze
- pheller 10mo agoSee https://www.prodigyreloaded.com https://www.prodigyreloaded.com - getting closer to public alpha.
- pheller 10mo agoAlso all the Prodigy Reloaded implementation is open sourced here : https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded/delivery-system https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded/delivery-system The reverse engineered client side programs from the various prodigy caches will be shared I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
- HeckFeck 10mo agoHave they open sourced the server? Revival projects should always do this, otherwise they are preserving nothing. A single point of failure means someone else will have to reverse-engineer the protocol and write the server software again in the future. Do it for posterity!
- timcobb 10mo agoWhy wouldn't a project like this be OSS? How do they expect to monetize? People buying dialtone subscriptions as a social network?
- johannes1234321 10mo agoBesides monetization there are other factors for not open sourcing. * fear of being critizied for bad code * not wanting to deal with contributions * license compliance (maybe using something commercial, maybe trying to hide bad license usage) * trying to keep control * missing understanding of open source in general * ...
- timcobb 10mo agoSo what is the idea with something then? Build software and...?
- greyface- 10mo agoI'm unable to find the server, but it looks like they've released some protocol analysis tooling: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap
- dark-star 10mo agoThere's another project, P3OL, that's also closed-source. I assume they're connected somehow. P3OL makes 100€/month through Patreon, I guess that is also this project's reason to stay closed-source
- 10mo ago
- ErroneousBosh 10mo agoNow make a Cosmic Conquest bot for it... ;-)
- chuckadams 10mo agoHugged to death it seems. They should put up a proxy that gives you a busy signal.
- hajrice 10mo agoLanding page design very much gives off that it was vibe coded by Claude. It has those unique specifics of all Claude designs.
- cramcgrab 10mo agoLove the Mac emulator, what do they use for that?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fcpguru 10mo agooh wow, I was just playing with all the dialtone frequencies in a little ios app: https://i.imgur.com/LGXEU7z.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/LGXEU7z.mp4 I really miss those sounds. Learned so much about all the different frequencies. No to get too woo-woo but did you know each tone is actually two frequencies a high and low one? The video above shows dialing either LOVE or FEAR. Not sure where this app is going but I had this idea to help catch myself whenever I'm following fear vs love.
- mrbuttons454 10mo agoWhen you think about how a touchtone phone works, it makes sense. :)
- greekrich92 10mo agoI tried the Mac demo on mobile and there wasn't a classic modem sound when connecting to AOL. It would be a nice touch.
- theandrewbailey 10mo agoDialtone doesn't sound like a dial tone?
- tcbawo 10mo agoThe dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake. Through some google searches, I came across this recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
- sylware 10mo agoThe new compuserv is google. The new AOL is meta.
- treebeard901 10mo agoThe world wide web, information super highway.
- reactordev 10mo agoAwwww, my teenage years reborn. I was just down the road from Westwood Village Drive, Tysons Corner in Reston learning to kung fu, math, hack, and talk to girls on AIM. I mastered 2 of those things. Keen to give this a shot as I had stacks and stacks of AOL CDs and floppies in my youth.
- iconidentify 10mo agoHey all — thanks for checking out Dialtone. I plan to open-source the server code eventually; for now I’m just having fun with it and continuing to iterate. I’m a firm believer that a reverse-engineered system like this — especially something so historically “90s internet” — ultimately needs to exist in an open-source way. To show I’m serious about the reverse-engineering work (and not just the nostalgia), here are two critical tools I’ve built for understanding AOL and its protocols: • WireTap: https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap A packet-level tracing tool for capturing and analyzing the conversations between an AOL client and server. • AtomForge: https://github.com/iconidentify/atomforge https://github.com/iconidentify/atomforge A full-blown FDO → ATOMSTREAM compiler. FDO is the bespoke scripting language AOL used to define “forms.” Before forms are transmitted over the wire (wrapped in a “P3” frame), they’re serialized down into bytes — AtomForge handles that whole pipeline.