Long Islanders lament (sort of) the dialing down of AOL dial-up

A moment of reflection, if you will, for AOL dial-up, the service that brought a generation of Long Islanders to the internet, and now is on the brink of its demise.

The service and accompanying software, "which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued" Sept. 30, the company said last week, not in a formal release but in a brief notice that appeared in its help pages. A spokesperson for Yahoo, which used to compete with AOL but now owns it, wrote in an email Monday the number of remaining users was very small.

The same could be said of dial-up in general.

Dialing down dial-up

In 2023 in Nassau County, according to the U.S. Census, the number of households with a dial-up internet subscription only was somewhere between zero and 315; for Suffolk, the estimate was 193 to 959. 

But for a brief moment in the history of human communication — roughly from the mid-1990s, when American internet use began to accelerate rapidly, through 2005, when for the first time, according to the Pew Research Center, more Americans connected to the gigabyte river of broadband than the garden hose of dial-up — AOL dial-up felt massive, its jangly tone ubiquitous. A marketing campaign the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History calls "vast and famously aggressive" put free trial discs into millions of American households, so many the museum acquired one for its collection. The company’s "You’ve got mail" greeting reverberated across the land before and after "You’ve Got Mail," the 1998 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romcom.

Long Islanders recalled the moment with ambivalence and some amount of bafflement because, like Sarah Nolan, 38, of Rocky Point, many remember dial-up as a hassle and had assumed the service had ended years ago.

"I had no idea it was still around," Nolan said. "To hear it’s shutting down, it’s part of my childhood [that is] now gone, but that’s fine."

Youth on dial-up was tough. Your parents would pick up the phone, "and now you'd be disconnected and then your chat went away with your friends," Nolan explained.

Or you had to take "annoying" turns with your siblings, recalled Center Moriches resident Marc Weiss, 36.

"Some days you’d be lucky, some days you wouldn’t be lucky, and the days you were lucky, you’d actually get online," he said.

Phone companies take lead

"Dial-up is something I never thought I’d be sentimental about," said Harvey Lieberman, 81, a clinical psychologist and essayist from Rockville Centre, who nevertheless warmed to the subject.

"The amazement of it, the wonder of it ... when you opened up your email, this sense of anticipation. ... It’d take 10 seconds to a minute."

The region’s tech experts said it had been years — many, many years — since AOL dial-up had been part of their professional discourse. Broadband is available across virtually all of Long Island, according to the New York State Department of Public Service.

"Everyone went to faster, more streamlined connections through their phone company," said Kathi Livornese, president of Long Island internet Headquarters, a Huntington Station company that on its website touts itself "as one of the original internet providers on Long Island," but now focuses on digital marketing, custom web design and programming. Many people still using AOL or other dial-up services may either have out-of-date computers or are in lower-income households, she said.

Paul Trapani, president of LISTnet, a Plainview-based nonprofit that supports local companies in the software and information technology industry, looked back with little fondness to a time when it was necessary to leave the internet to make a phone call. The best dial-up connection could take days to download a movie and couldn’t support many modern software applications, said Trapani, also co-founder of software company PassTech Development.

"In so many ways the world is better because we have internet on all the time," he said. "It’s become essential to work," with broadband and cell connections now conveying information at thousands of times the speed of dial-up.

"It might make you nostalgic to think about (a time) when you weren’t getting all these alerts," he said. "But the amount of human knowledge within reach in seconds is incredible."