[HN Gopher] Dialtone - AOL 3.0 Server
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Dialtone - AOL 3.0 Server
Author : rickcarlino
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-12-28 03:40 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dialtone.live)
(TXT) w3m dump (dialtone.live)
| JojoFatsani wrote:
| Oh 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 wrote:
| Maybe you just really need unhinged mode for verisimilitude
| bitwize wrote:
| AOL 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 wrote:
| This. 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 wrote:
| It can be both. For many, AOL was their onboarding platform
| for the chaotic internet at large. It served that purpose
| well.
| literatepeople wrote:
| Given their seeming affinity towards signing in with "X" I
| doubt you'll have the option.
| agentifysh wrote:
| what was AOL exactly i never experienced it but would constantly
| get these CDs in the mail with Air Warrior
| pests wrote:
| AOL 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I admit I was a young child during the AOL-mailer-cd era. I
| don't really know what came before.
| toast0 wrote:
| AOL started off as something different from an ISP.
|
| Like Prodigy and Compuserve and GEnie and some others, it was
| an on-line information system. Chat, message boards, news,
| stock quotes, (limited) shopping, games, software downloads,
| etc. But all within a single system. Kind of like a
| nationwide/global BBS, but with a GUI interface. In the 80s,
| all these systems were independent, in the early 90s they got
| internet email, and the mid 90s added web browsers and
| (eventually) real tcp/ip.
| pests wrote:
| I was young during the era, your probably right. I was just
| sharing my experience.
| ycombiredd wrote:
| Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1),
| which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2),
| which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to
| the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight,
| that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and
| integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more
| subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I
| just described, at no time did anyone in the industry
| actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size
| distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved
| or not, never really escaped their second class
| designation, which also tended to taint their users as they
| ventured on to the larger internet.
|
| All that said, I still communicate with one person who
| maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite
| of it all.
| serf wrote:
| Mindspring, I haven't read that in a long time.
|
| Didn't they try to come back as a brand when free ad-
| supported dialups became a thing for a bit?
| ycombiredd wrote:
| I dunno. I left around 1999, just before the EarthLink
| merger.
|
| Related, while doing a quick search to see if I could
| learn anything about what you described I found Wikipedia
| quoting NYT as writing about EarthLink in 2000: "second
| largest Internet service provider after America Online".
| I guess it was around y2k when aol finally got its ISP
| (and this its "world's largest") designation by the world
| at large. :)
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Wildcat bbs implemented tcp/ip around 1995 but by that
| point AOL had won. Had wildcat came out with tcp/ip support
| maybe even a year earlier, the "internet" would be a wildly
| different place today
| miki123211 wrote:
| Did the AOL protocol (whatever the AOL app itself used for
| chat etc.) go over TCP/IP, or was that its own network,
| parallel to the internet?
|
| Was the limitation that you couldn't use AOL from a different
| ISP artificial (whitelisted IP ranges, no routing to relevant
| addresses from the outside), or did it actually use an
| "internetless" protocol that you just couldn't emulate if all
| you had was the internet?
|
| I vaguely remember reading somewhere that internet access was
| a late addition to AOL, hence the question.
| tjohns wrote:
| AOL was it's own network, completely parallel to the
| internet. It didn't use TCP/IP, it used a propritary
| transport called P3 - heavily optimized for dialup.
|
| They had their own dedicated client app, where each page
| loaded in its own window. It didn't use HTML, it used
| something called "Rainman". URLs weren't a thing, you
| accessed "channels" (pages) by entering a specific
| "keyword".
|
| Later on, in 1993, they added support for Usenet (see:
| "Eternal September"). Then in 1994 they added support for
| Gopher and WWW. So you could dial into the AOL client, and
| then open a regular web browser. But for most home users,
| there was more content in the AOL walled garden, so the web
| was something of a curiosity at first.
|
| So to answer your question: It wasn't an artificial
| limitation. AOL was designed in a way that was
| fundamentally alien to the way the Internet + Web evolved.
|
| (At some point, you could connect to AOL over TCP/IP -
| useful if you had a broadband Internet connection but still
| wanted access to content on the AOL network. This was done
| by encapsulating P3 inside a TCP/IP header. You still had
| to use the AOL client software and have an AOL membership.)
| bitwize wrote:
| AOL was an "online service", internet connectivity was
| provided starting in the mid-90s but the real value was in
| their proprietary members-only services. An online service
| was more or less a large BBS you dialed into via modem, the
| first of which could be accessed with an ordinary telecoms
| program but later ones like AOL and Prodigy required special
| client software that could decode the proprietary protocol
| allowing the service to send graphics, menus, and other
| information to present a UI to the user.
| tapoxi wrote:
| It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a
| curated experience before the internet and web standardized
| things.
|
| When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if
| you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into
| "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like
| Sports or Kids.
|
| You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a
| URL.
|
| The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything
| was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were
| shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD.
| Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could
| take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.
|
| After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an
| ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it
| didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.
|
| It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with
| CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly
| called eWorld.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| In the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this
| Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic
| communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee
| invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary
| online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the
| telephone network.
|
| AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats,
| forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some
| time. It was a walled garden that required both money and
| special software to access.
|
| There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each
| with different shapes for how the walls of their respective
| gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing
| services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.
|
| Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time
| moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy disks with
| their software on what seemed like a continuous basis, with
| flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd
| wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for
| whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch.
| Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as
| drink coasters.)
|
| These services each vied to get as many users locked into their
| garden as possible, which was important to them because they
| tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix
| or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using
| these services, the more money they had to spend.
|
| And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The
| walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these
| proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater
| Internet had to offer.
|
| But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big.
| They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly
| interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying
| Time Warner for $182 billion.
|
| And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| throwawaygmbno wrote:
| I learned the concept of social engineering in middle school
| through those AOL CDs. There was a culture of making proggies
| and learning about the inner workings of how AOL the program
| and the company worked if you were interested and knew where to
| look.
|
| If you called into a certain department at AOL, you could tell
| them you were a business and would like to put out their CDs
| for display. So long as the order was for under 1000 or so they
| would send them to you, for free, directly to the address of
| the "business".
|
| I also learned in middle school that CDs sting but don't really
| hurt and the various ways to launch attacks in a CD war with
| friends and classmates. You throw CDs vertical to be precise
| and sideways for a crazy flight path to confuse your opponents.
|
| Sadly I also discovered that all the racist didn't die in the
| 70s, as the owner of one of the largest AOL hacking discussion
| forums I frequented loved to talk about how he would move if a
| black family ever moved into his neighborhood.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Finally I can get those 100 free hours I was promised
| keyle wrote:
| "Zerocool" nice touch :-)
| vunderba wrote:
| Still waiting on a Prodigy online emulator, but in the meantime
| at least somebody recreated MadMaze!
|
| https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze
| pheller wrote:
| See https://www.prodigyreloaded.com - getting closer to public
| alpha.
| pheller wrote:
| Also all the Prodigy Reloaded implementation is open sourced
| here : 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.
| pram wrote:
| Amazing work! Started playing Civ on the VM and wasted 3 hours
| lol
| b33j0r wrote:
| Just one more turn before my family can send and receive phone
| calls on the landline.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Have 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 wrote:
| Why wouldn't a project like this be OSS? How do they expect to
| monetize? People buying dialtone subscriptions as a social
| network?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Besides 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
|
| * ...
| greyface- wrote:
| I'm unable to find the server, but it looks like they've
| released some protocol analysis tooling:
| https://github.com/iconidentify/wiretap
| dark-star wrote:
| There's another project, P3OL, that's also closed-source. I
| assume they're connected somehow.
|
| P3OL makes 100EUR/month through Patreon, I guess that is also
| this project's reason to stay closed-source
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| There was Nina too and then they destroyed the discord over a
| weirdo pedo mod and took down the website. Also closed source
| because they're also selfish.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Now make a Cosmic Conquest bot for it... ;-)
| chuckadams wrote:
| Hugged to death it seems. They should put up a proxy that gives
| you a busy signal.
| hajrice wrote:
| Landing page design very much gives off that it was vibe coded by
| Claude. It has those unique specifics of all Claude designs.
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Love the Mac emulator, what do they use for that?
| fcpguru wrote:
| oh wow, I was just playing with all the dialtone frequencies in a
| little ios app:
|
| 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 wrote:
| When you think about how a touchtone phone works, it makes
| sense. :)
| greekrich92 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Dialtone doesn't sound like a dial tone?
| tcbawo wrote:
| The 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
| sylware wrote:
| The new compuserv is google.
|
| The new AOL is meta.
| devin wrote:
| That is an interesting (and surprisingly accurate) way of
| framing it.
| treebeard901 wrote:
| The world wide web, information super highway.
| reactordev wrote:
| Awwww, 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.
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(page generated 2025-12-28 23:01 UTC)