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dobermanz 15 hours ago [-]
Its 1996 - AOHell is loading,
Aphex Twin blasts over 28.8, cordless phones hidden,
a pizza is on the way…
devin 14 hours ago [-]
AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.
romanhn 13 hours ago [-]
I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.
sgarland 13 hours ago [-]
I was gonna say, we absolutely had streaming music. Did it suck? Yes, but it was novel, so it was acceptable. I had a 33.6 connection that my ISP eventually upgraded to full 56K, which I discovered by noticing that the dial-up handshake sounded different.
Man… I sound old.
jamesbfb 12 hours ago [-]
You’ve unlocked a memory for me! I had that same experience when I heard a different series of squeals than normal only to realise the modem had negotiated something faster than 31.2!
Ylpertnodi 6 hours ago [-]
I turned my squeals off.
Got a phone bill.
Turned on the sqeals.
Dialler.exe was calling the Seychelles.
That was back in the days when my telecom let me off the bill (7* my monthly income at the time) because 'You have a virus".
doublerabbit 5 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of a time that on the weekends my parents would drive to my grandads who had a computer. My grandad was a television screen writer and I had discovered Habbo Hotel, so win win.
Of course hormones being all the rage at 17, I decided to look at porn and printed it out so I could show it around at school. What I had done was downloaded a premium rate dialler that ended costing him around £100 back in 2003.
I had gone downstairs and forgotten to disconnect. He's passed now but sorry Grandad for the phone bill. I had never realised what I had done until many years later.
Still, I was one of the cooler kids in school for having a HP DeskJet printed crumpled piece of paper of a naked lady.
LeoPanthera 6 hours ago [-]
I used to listen to Art Bell on the Coast to Coast RealAudio stream - from the UK!
I think it was before "RealVideo" so it was still just "RealAudio" and not "RealPlayer". Or something like that.
11 hours ago [-]
devin 10 hours ago [-]
I'm taking the downvote in stride, but 14.4 and 28.8 RealAudio streaming seems like it lasted all of 3 months and then people had napster and were pulling 96k mp3s.
sgarland 16 minutes ago [-]
I had AudioGalaxy before Napster, and preferred higher bitrates (192 KBPS CBR, until VBR took off), but yes - RealAudio didn’t have that long of a lifetime in comparison.
6 hours ago [-]
ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago [-]
> no one was streaming music on 28.8.
In 2000-ish I was streaming video on 28.8 - not very good video, but video nonetheless.
Also, I'm pretty sure "28.8 Aphex Twin" was more a reference to this sound:
In a touch of irony this blog is throwing some null error
knuckleheads 14 hours ago [-]
Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:
>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey
mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first
ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.
>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing
up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned
out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on
relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of
Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all
pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying
to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before
giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection
timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.
Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well
> Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages
for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down.
Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94
mac-chaffee 11 hours ago [-]
That's really cool! I actually did download an archive of aol-sucks while researching this, but the software I was using to look through the mbox file was kinda buggy so I gave up. I'm literally the meme of the miner guy giving up right before hitting diamonds.
knuckleheads 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah I was surprised a while back that ChatGPT was pulling them up (I was doing some research on origins of sudoku and it was pulled up very old threads on Usenet). So now I specifically ask for it and it consistently finds me some gold. Might take a few rounds of saying do deeper research but it often works.
jyounker 6 hours ago [-]
It's first paragraph leaves me disappointed. It's 1996. Worries over a tech bubble are a few years away. And there are no tensions with Russia really, because Americans didn't give a damn about the first Chechen war.
ThrowawayTestr 8 hours ago [-]
The bit about Steve Schalchlin really affected me. The idea that someone's whole life could have been different, or much shorter, if they hadn't seen a piece of info at the right time. Gives me chills.
Ozzie-D 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
draw_down 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stigz 14 hours ago [-]
> We, ngrok, have sponsored Mac to write this post because we think it’s an underexplored perspective on the topic of reliability.
Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.
CursedSilicon 13 hours ago [-]
History is important and interesting to some of us. Just because it's not a direct 1:1 mapping of computer problems today doesn't make it any less intellectually stimulating to read about
Man… I sound old.
Of course hormones being all the rage at 17, I decided to look at porn and printed it out so I could show it around at school. What I had done was downloaded a premium rate dialler that ended costing him around £100 back in 2003.
I had gone downstairs and forgotten to disconnect. He's passed now but sorry Grandad for the phone bill. I had never realised what I had done until many years later.
Still, I was one of the cooler kids in school for having a HP DeskJet printed crumpled piece of paper of a naked lady.
I think it was before "RealVideo" so it was still just "RealAudio" and not "RealPlayer". Or something like that.
In 2000-ish I was streaming video on 28.8 - not very good video, but video nonetheless.
Also, I'm pretty sure "28.8 Aphex Twin" was more a reference to this sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-DaFZgCcvA
>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM
Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E
Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3
>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.
nanog on seclists was an interesting read too https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51
Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well > Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down. Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94
Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.